notations, dreams, concertos, drumstrings
howdy, and welcome to 2014. here's a few things that are perhaps not substantive enough to be their own posts but that are funny or interesting enough to me to post.
Drumset notation primer
the drumset is about a hundred years old now, and it's a quintessentially american instrument: toms are a hybrid from china, africa, and native americans, the snare drum and bass drum are european (by way of ancient middle-eastern and north-african tabors and davuls), cymbals are turkish unless their chinese, hardware like the bass drum pedal the product of american industrialism, all initially played in vaudeville and largely black military bands. it is the only multiple percussion set up that has it's own name, but that name is a bit like 'christian,' or 'sports,' in that it's such a broad term as to contain almost no information. the 'ss bozzio,' the kits of bill bruford, chris dave, sonny greer, and kenny clarke are all wildly different instruments under the same word.
throughout it's history, notation has been a bugbear for composers and drummers both. a few hugely influential drummers couldn't read music. it's still not standardized, but we're much closer. hopefully what's outlined here will answer some basic questions.
firstly, some thoughts on notation: it's somewhere between a recipe card and an engineering diagram--it can be very beautiful on its own, but it's nothing more than instructions for the thing to be made (or not). when reading music, it should be as intuitively laid out as possible, to give the performer the quickest possible path from playing notes to making music. it is a graph where the x-axis is time, and the y-axis is pitch height (with one drummy exception).
to that end, some notation etiquette that will make everyone's job easier:
-wherever possible, the measures in a system should mirror the phrase length--don't give five measure systems for a song in eight measure phrases.
-please don't pass out a five page chart with two measures on the last page.
-text cues such as 'trombones enter,' 'heavier,' etc are very helpful.
-music cues in an ossia staff, or notated in cue-sized noteheads above the staff are great--they show the drummer enough of what's happening to give him or her the opportunity to use their musical instincts to interact (or not).
-rehearsal numbers and double-barlines at sections are also awesome.
-if you wrote a 'latin' chart, bother to find out what kind of latin.
-especially in drum charts, repeat signs are your friends, as are 'slash notation' and the expression mark 'cont. sim.'
-follow beaming conventions.
personally, the less certain the composer is about what they want from the drums, the more information i want to see from the rest of the piece, to help me construct options based on the existing material.
click the photo to expand.
lastly, if you've hired a good drummer, do yourself and your music the service of letting that person use their musical instincts, and refine it from there. hope this has been helpful.
okay fine, we'll paint your dreams or whatever
as an instrumentalist the job is to play an instrument. as a musician the job is to play music, and i've worked hard for that title. as an artist the job is to make art. each of these three wonderful things exist perfectly well without concious 'self-expression.'
the simple fact of being a person with some certain age, set of life experiences, and genetic predispositions means that who you are will come through just fine in whatever project you approach honestly. in high school, i pushed very hard in my big band and combo's to play expressively, to put my voice into the thing being made, with mixed success if you ask any of my teachers. in my first college, my playing was mostly not what teachers or peers wanted to hear or help me get better at, so for my fourth semester there, i decided that anything played beyond just keeping time had to be derived from a specific musical event that preceded it. i also didn't wear shoes in february in new york and my hair was very long. it was not the right place for me at the time.
around that time my taste in music was changing. my favorite songs/pieces/etc were not ones 'that really relate to me,' not songs where older people wrote, sang, or played about feelings or experiences i had had or was having. what could be more boring than hearing people tell me about being me, or more cloying than how to feel about being me? i became interested in music and art i had no idea how to comprehend, and have settled into a place where i like almost anything, so long as it is well-built.
improvised music is a notorious haven for chronic self-expressers, and that's a damn shame. there is a critical way in which improvised music is like cooking: the whole point is that however long it took to make--nevermind being able to make it--you are supposed to consume it, make it a part of you, and then it's gone, never to exist in that way again. when improvising i try not to put myself into the equation at all, try to build music from scratch. it's really hard and i don't succeed often, but that's the goal. when the improvising is going really well, i'm seemingly just along for the ride, reading the non-existent score of a piece.
practical rules for writing a percussion concerto
1) only use all the instruments.
2) all the instruments should include a drumset or pseudo-drumset.
3) the drumset or pseudo-drumset should be featured at the point in the piece corresponding to its golden ratio, by playing a rock groove, preferably in triple meter.
4) direct musical quotes from wagner or stravinsky are encouraged, but not required.
5) john cage, timbre, and time should be mentioned in the program notes, whether or not they are explored in the piece.
drums are strings
anything strings can do, drums can do better. except being bowed or plucked. maybe that doesn't hold up....
think of a string. it's attached to two bases, each providing tension, and often both providing the opportunity for tuning. on a stringed instrument, if you played right close to the center, you'd be playing sul tasto, a technique that gives off few overtones. by contrast playing sul ponticello, near the bridge, will give more overtones the closer to the bridge you get. if you play the string with a finger lightly held at a node (1/2, 1/4) you activate a harmonic based on the overtone series.
a drumhead can be thought of as infinitely many strings: with the exception of rational overtones and bowing, a drumhead behaves very similarly to a string. when the imaginary string is in tune with itself and its mates around the drumhead you get a clear tone. when they're out of tune with one another, you get phasing issues and the pitch will change drastically after being struck.
as a bonus, whereas alternate tuning systems are only just coming back in style after about 200 years--when an english piano builder sent beethoven a piano tuned in equal temperament--the drumset can change not just from genre to genre (imagine any beatles snare drum sound on any def leppard song or vice versa), but often from song to song or piece to piece.