Playing percussioin

First published in Column 8, on the 15.5.91

National brass band competitions are here again. By the time you read this, I should be in Christchurch in my capacity as official accompanist for one of the Dunedin bands.

No Harold, I don’t accompany a whole brass band, just play the piano for the soloists.

I used to think brass bands were rather at the bottom of the musical barrel before I got involved. Then I heard them play the complex music they’re expected to perform for those competitions.

You have to be there. Bands aren’t heard at their best marching along George St in the Festival Procession. Or in the Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. In marching most of their wind goes into keeping their feet moving. What air is left has to try to produce some musical noise out of pieces of plumbing with plungers.

In band rotundas any musical subtlety is wafted away for only the seagulls and sparrows to hear.

Bandsmen are at their best when they can sit and play without the distraction of kids whining for ice-blocks or wanting bread for the ducks. And the music they play has greatly increased in difficulty in the last few decades.

I know the difficulties at first hand, because twice I’ve been roped in as a supernumerary percussion player. Band conductors are under a delusion that reasonable pianists make more than adequate percussionists.

(Since I already make the trip as a pianist, it’s economic, if not musical, sense to employ my abilities as fourth percussionist.)

In my first foray into percussioning, I came in on rehearsals after the band had been practicing for weeks. I was assured by the conductor that I’d find it all straightforward – ‘an excellent musician like yourself.’ (His words, not mine.)

That particular experience is now embalmed in the recesses of my memory, hopefully never to be revived. The second occasion is not so easily forgotten, although I had plenty of rehearsal.

I found myself playing – not simultaneously – tambourine, glockenspiel, cymbals, triangle, marimba and gong (a large one). I am not fluent in any of these instruments.

You’d think hitting a triangle or gong would be easy. It is, if you’ve nothing else to think about. But hitting either one precisely in time with a group of other noises, most of them windy, isn’t simple.

Worse, to hit the gong, I had to turn my back on both the music and the conductor. (If I missed my cue, I tended to keep my back to that gentleman.)

As for the tambourine, it’s not just a matter of giving it a thunk! Sometimes the jingles mustn’t jing, and sometimes you have to rub it the wrong way to produce what percussionists call a trill. Producing that sort of trill it not trilling to a pianist.

The glockenspiel can’t be played with the fingers, which I’d find easy. It has to be played at a distance, as it were, with a couple of sticks, rather like dancing on stilts, and making your feet hit a precise spot on the ground each time. The marimba’s just as bad, except because it’s bigger, there’s more of it to miss.

Add to this the nervousness of playing before a large crowd, who all know you’re a fraud and not a proper percussionist at all, unlike those superhuman youngsters who can play three timpani and a triangle and a side-drum simultaneously.

A bit of performance adrenalin never went amiss, but after my forays into percussion playing give me accompanying any time.

A marimba player (NDR Radiophilharmonie), Hanover, 2003
courtesy איתן טל Etan Tal

I’m not sure who ‘Harold’ is supposed to be, but I think it was one of those names I’d picked out of a hat as a kind of person to address on occasions. The ‘trip’ I mention was going to Christchurch with the band.

I talk as if playing for the brass band was my first experience of being a percussionist. I think that came much earlier, back in the mid-sixties, when I was the repetiteur (rehearsal pianist) for the NZ Opera Company’s nationwide tour of the opera Die Fledermaus. Again it was a matter of economics. It made no sense to employ a percussionist to play a few random bars at odd times during the production, so, since I was already being paid, they roped me in. I used to hit a triangle during the overture, and then spend a good long time reading in the orchestra pit (I remember getting through The Hobbit among other things). At some point I played a glockenspiel, trying to keep in time with a singer on the stage pretending to get music out of the prison bars. I don’t remember what else I did, but it wasn’t much.

Glockenspiels have a mini-keyboard, hence my comment, but the keys are small and fashioned to be hit by little sticks with little round wooden heads. The marimba is similar except everything is bigger.