Dear Reader,

My teacher Robert van Sice used to say that in each percussion lesson he hoped that his students would learn (at least) three domain-specific ideas about percussion, and at least one idea about music0making in general. This tenet stuck with me, and in recent years I’ve expanded this practice beyond percussion and endeavored to learn at least three new things each week, and at least one thing-behind-the-thing.

1. Drumming with Doctors

This week was the final meeting of my Medical Humanities course at Creighton University’s Phoenix Medical Campus. Creighton has a robust Medical Humanities program, where, alongside their medical courses, students take Student Interest Selectives, a collection of short-term seminars on humanities issues intended to contextualize medical study.

Along my path of thinking about what we need in order to learn a piece of music, I’ve been ruminating on music’s power to focus attention and draw connections between people; how music exists of course within cultures, but also takes part in formation of cultures. So, what better topic to take on with the Creighton students than how musical ensembles can hone skills around community-making, community preservation, and community communication? So, as the med students experimented on various organs, I experimented on them!

Through our “drumming and public health” course, we explored how participatory musical cultures bind (or as Jonathan Haidt says, “bind and blind”) their members together in shared experiences; how they embody and articulate cultural knowledge, morality, and norms. How might musical groups—steel bands, Gamelan, marching bands, etc— help one become part of a culture? How might music cultivate a moral imagination which engenders the capacity to appreciate and understand the lived experiences of others? Finally, we drew connections between the mental representations necessary to fit into an interlocking musical texture and the kinds of quick diagnoses medical professionals (hopefully) make.

Along the way, we…drummed… taking on Gahu, a dance-drumming tradition of the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin.

I love working with these students. They bring such a great perspective to their work. At the same time, they come into the course with a defined cohort, which makes it easier to ask students to take risks. Watching these students dive head first into complex interlocking drumming parts, dynamic songs, and coordination-challenging dancing was so inspiring. I particularly love the “late onset performance anxiety,” a growing fear of public performance that generally sets in about 1 week before our concert.

2. Original Instruments

While sharing recordings of 1930s percussion music in my Percussion Repertoire course, I rediscovered an incredible recording of car brake drums, in this case a Ford Model A or B from the late 1920s.

For percussionists, these are our “Period Instruments:” in the 1930s and 1940s, composers like John Cage and Lou Harrison wrote extensively for brake drums.

Here’s a contemporary brake drum, more of a clank than gooooonggggg.

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The instrumentaria for “early” percussion ensemble works (think contemporaries of the Pan American Association of Composers) is both specific and vague.

These older brakes are so much more resonant and clairvoyant than the shrill, anvil-like contemporary instruments that they fundamentally challenge our interpretation of these earlier percussion works. In fact, one might be inclined to substitute a bundt pan for a brake drum, as Canadian super-percussionist Bob Becker argues here. Tin cans—common in Cage’s works—have so fundamentally changed in composition since 1930 that one might be better served by using a beer mini-keg in their stead. The “tom toms” that Cage writes for are Chinese instruments, much more similar in sound to a conga than a contemporary drum set Tom Tom.

For those that are interested, percussionists Thad Anderson and William Winant have been working on the Lou Harrison Percussion Instrument Collection, a set of instruments Harrison owned and used. Now housed at Mills College, these instruments are elucidating vis a vis the sound world of the 1930s and 1940s percussion ensemble​

I love Brake Drum 7!!

These cans, rattles, and pipes are our “period instruments,” the equivalent of a harpsichord or a violin with gut strings. They give us percussionists vital information about how these pieces might have sounded at the time. While we don’t necessarily need to use these instruments in our performances, they can inform our performance practice by making prescriptive musical notation a bit more sonically descriptive.

3. Original Condiments

Speaking of original “instruments,” one of my favorite social media accounts is Sandwiches of History. In each episode, Barry follows a historical sandwich recipe, tastes the results. “If they have potential,” Barry “plusses them up for the modern palate with modern ingredients:

While I love a Yeast Sandwich, Ham and Anchovy Sandwich,​Toast Sandwich, and a Scraped Chicken Sandwich as much as the next person, Barry’s desire to bring these sandwiches to life in a way that’s parsable for a modern eater resonates. Authenticity is terrific, but authentic can be so “othered” that it tastes…bad! I’m not sure musicians need to add sriracha or pickled peppers to every slice of buttered bread, but the notion a recipe as necessarily evolving is certainly of a type with allowing a musical interpretation to evolve.

Actually, the cookbooks themselves are rough equivalents of musical treatises, and what they include (lots of buttered bread, it seems) seem to point towards cultural norms, notions of who cooked what and how. The sandwich seemed to be having a moment in the late 19th century. The books from which Barry draws also indicate contemporary attitudes towards cooking, with recipes that include a lot of space for individual taste and less of the specificity and narrative of contemporary books.

As a sidebar, cookbook titles sure are descriptive…

• The American Woman’s Cook Book (1939)
• Nine Hundred Successful Recipes (1923)
• 1001 Sandwiches (1936)
• Salads and Sandwiches (1917)
• Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1865)

Finally, one pervasive through-line in Sandwiches of History is an uncertainty towards mustard. Mustard seed, powdered mustard, mustard greens, prepared mustard. Which do they mean? It seems that cookbook authors’ laissez-faire attitude towards indicating what type of mustard should be used, might indicate, just like Brahms’ hairpins, that “you should know.”

4. Cultural Mayonnaise

When we bind ourselves to others in shared experiences, be they drumming, salvaging car parts or assembling sandwiches, our assumptions are as much a part of the binding (the cultural mayonnaise) as our explicit actions and statements. These assumptions are a negative space—a shared blindness—and emerge when a cultural artifact is transported to a place, time, or context different from its origin. The assumptions are more indicative of the culture than the artifacts, or at least more delicious.