Percussion
 |
Alberto Netto, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"When I was younger, I had one occasion when I was asked to play samba for a group touring in Brazil. I'm from Brazil, and I didn't know how to play the samba! The moral? Don't take it for granted, just because you're from a place, that you know that culture really well. You need to learn your own cultural rhythms sometimes. Now I teach drum set, and my expertise is Brazilian music."
Read More |
Kim Plainfield, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Playing in a band is the culmination of everything my students do in music. All the practicing, all the listening, all the training—it all comes together in a band. It's important to understand all those dynamics and what's necessary to support them. Developing the capacity to listen while playing is paramount in becoming a good musician."
Read More |
Mark Walker, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Carmen McCrae once said, 'It's more important to listen than it is to play.' It's such a simple concept, but very deep. It's a hard concept for some drummers to understand, but the working drummers understand it. That's why someone like Steve Gadd, one of the world's greatest drummers, plays next to nothing and everybody loves it, because he's totally supporting what's going on. He plays what the music needs. When it comes time to whip it out, he can deliver!"
 |
Nancy Zeltsman, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"One of the hardest things about playing marimba is that you need an eight-and-a-half-foot wingspan. Note accuracy is the bane of our existence. A bar of a marimba is something like an inch and a half wide, so as you're flailing around over eight and a half feet, the challenge is to be able to swing a mallet and hit the right target. We like that people enjoy a concert, aside from the beautiful sound, because it's fun to watch."
Read More |
"If you want to really know the language of any instrument or any music, you have to go to the roots. I always say, I can teach you A-B-C-D-E-F-G until Z, but if I don't teach you how to put those letters together, to make words and make sense, you don't know what to do with them. Students have to learn—go back to the roots—no matter what instrument they play."
Read More |
Yoron Israel, Assistant Chair
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Drummers don't play an instrument where we're consistently called upon to play pyrotechnics and get paid for it. We have to blend with other musicians around us and make them feel good. So one of the things I emphasize in my teaching is sound and touch, which is very subtle and somewhat of a lost art in a lot of ways. But it's so important in the real world because you have to be able to play any given room, whether it's a tiny club or a festival amphitheatre."
Read More |
Victor Mendoza, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"There is a misconception that you take one course in Latin music, therefore you know it all. That'd be like saying you studied one Bach prelude, therefore you understand Baroque music. When it comes to Latin music and Latin jazz, it goes very deep."
Read More |
Rod Morgenstein, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Most drummers are not involved in the creative songwriting process, and the bottom line is that, by and large, that is where the most significant amount of money is made. If you're one of those drummers who sits in the corner reading magazines and eating pizza while waiting for the rest of the band to get the song together so you can just add your oom-pah, oom-pah-pah to it, you can have a scenario where you'll still be home living with your parents and driving your 15-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it while the main songwriter in the band pulls up to rehearsal in a brand-new Porsche. . . . So I encourage my students to dig down deep and see if they have any kind of creative songwriting abilities. I want them to avoid what I had to live through. It took me a while to say, 'Oh, I get it. Time to come to the party.'"
Read More |
"I deal with a lot of nonpercussionists, too—piano players, singers, horn players. I enjoy that almost more than teaching drummers. They don't have any preconceptions. One of the things that I show people who are not drummers is that just because you're playing this pattern on a hand drum, that doesn't mean that you can't apply the phrasing to your guitar comping or whatever. I'm trying to get them to think outside of the box. Many times they get caught up with the idea that it has to be done here, in this context. But that's not necessarily the case."
Read More |
David DiCenso, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"As musicians, we need to be great at multitasking. To open up your imagination is a form of multitasking. A drummer who's playing a groove—supporting a band—has to go beyond the strictly technical and physical places to find that great feel. One way is to focus, close our eyes, and imagine something related to what we're playing. That's going to inject feeling into our groove that's a little deeper than what it was a moment ago."
Read More