PASIC 2012 Reflections

Without question the biggest three days of my professional year are at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC).  This year, PASIC was in Austin, Texas for the third time since I started attending in 2002.  It is also composer John Cage’s 100th birthday this year, so in addition to the usual events, a special “Focus Theme” emphasized his contributions to percussion in the 20th century with concerts, talks and paper presentations.

It’s impossible to see or do everything at PASIC, so here is what I saw, loved, and think everyone should know about.  It was a big year for me in a lot of ways and much of what I’ve been thinking about and working on took a huge leap forward as a result of this year’s events.

Thursday:

Nebosja Jovan Zivkovic Showcase Concert:  This concert was impacted severely by Hurricane Sandy.  Most of the players were trapped in Europe, and two of them landed in Austin literally an hour before they played.  Zivkovic, being a wizard of the stage, played brilliantly anyway, and filled out the missing 30 minutes of his program with a GREAT clinic on how he connects his playing with singing.  He played several of his works while singing them, either note-for-note, or by shape and concept, and it was awesome.

Zivkovic’s music always feels very natural to me, even the really weird stuff, and singing is the reason.  He told us directly, “No singing, no music”.  As sad as it was to hear that his concert wouldn’t go off as planned, I wouldn’t trade the last 30 minutes for anything.

Marching Percussion Festival:  There are numerous competitions for high school and college students in marching percussion including: Solo snare and tenors, small ensemble, stand still large group and marching large group.  The judges are among the greatest figures in the marching community, and the comments and feedback students receive is of exceptional value.

My favorite part of the competition is seeing groups very close to and slightly above the level I’m teaching at.  It’s a great “mountain top” experience to look at a group and say “that is exactly the direction we could go in (6 months, 12 months, 2 years, etc)” or to realize there’s something about the way a group performs or an effect they add that I’ve never seen that could really improve what I’m doing. I could spend all day watching groups though I usually don’t, and I rarely fail to learn something.

Friday:

Troy University Percussion Ensemble Showcase Concert:  What a monster concert.  Basically four guys carried the whole thing and were playing on set-ups they built themselves.  The last piece on the program was by Aurel Hollo, who, if you don’t know, writes some of the most insanely cool percussion chamber music ever. The players built a metal box frame they stood in and around with their instruments attached all around it, hanging, swinging, and sticking out in all directions.  It added a totally sweet visual/spatial element to all the crazy notes they were playing.  If the concert ends up on YouTube I’ll link it, because it was a knock out.  I love being around top-level anything, it reminds me how far I can go in my own work.

Bill Bachman “12 Rudiments=12 Hand Motions=Complete Hand Technique”: Sometimes a clinic changes your life.  This one might change the future of drumming. Bill Bachman is one of the greatest marching tenor drummers ever, and he’s teaching the current generation of the best players in DCI and WGI.  He has a very down-to-earth, common sense way of explaining some of the most technically complex ideas in percussion, and can deliver an idea with incredible clarity and brevity.

In 1933 the National Association of Rudimental Drummers (NARD) defined 13 essential rudiments in American drumming and 26 standard rudiments, and in the 80s the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) redefined them as 40 standard rudiments.  Now we’re at another crossroads.

40 Rudiments seems like a lot, but actually a lot of them are very similar, to the point of being almost the same thing from an execution standpoint.  Additionally, in practice there are hundreds of “hybrid” rudiments which combine elements of the 40 and are, in many cases, more common and WAY harder to play.  Many of the rules for how to play the 40 do not account for the challenges of hybrids.

Bill has a new book, which I bought (devoured would be more accurate), called Stick Technique.  It has 12 rudiments in it, and a collection of brutal chop-busting exercises in the back.  By the time you master all his material on these 12 rudiments, you can play literally anything, because the rudiments are chosen based on how your hands have to move to play them, especially to play them fast.

I’m so pumped about the potential of this approach, I’m dedicating 30-60 minutes a day to mastering the book.  I’ve already replaced several parts of my regular teaching material because this is way better than anything I’ve ever seen.  I love geniuses, they make me more effective than I could be on my own.

Michael Burritt Showcase Concert:  Mike Burritt is my personal hero, so anything I say is really biased.  I think he’s pretty much the best thing ever.  8 years ago I started studying with him and he was so far beyond me I couldn’t really understand where that was.  6 years ago I could understand, and could not imagine anything better.  Today, he’s better.  Unimaginably, impossibly better.

It’s mostly his physical approach and tone production that freak me out.  I don’t want to say “he has good technique” because that sounds academic and misses the point. He has great physical approach.  He simply must be viewed to be understood. Fortunately, he makes movies.  I’m working every day to capture his arm release and loose grip.  It comes from structural stability and mechanical alignment, both of which are developed with lots and lots and lots of time and intent.  That physical combination gives him a gesture that delivers weight into the bars and brings out a sound that lighter players can’t get.  Same mallets, same instrument, different tone. Of the Steven’s Technique players, only he has it on that level that I’m aware of.

Saturday:

Thomas Burritt and the University of Texas at Austin Percussion Ensemble: Another crazy, monster concert by one of the best college programs in the world. Tom recently did a marimba concert in which he programmed a 30-minute set of works without pause in between.  In order to do that he had to select the works carefully, create an expressive arc through all of them, and figure out how to change mallets and move from one work to the next without interrupting the musical line. Saturday’s concert was a 50-minute extension of this idea for chamber ensemble with choir and soloists.

Tom wrote a post on this concert the week before PASIC.

Basically this was a gripping ride with no time to breathe or react as an audience member from beginning to end.  It was WAY better in that sense than a multi-movement work with pauses between movements, because it felt like ONE THING and not four things grouped together with the same title.  I cannot wait to see how far this idea can go, and I hope I can start to toy with it myself in some much less ambitious way.

Sandi Rennick and the Santa Clara Vanguard Front Ensemble:  This whole experience can be summed up very simply in a quote from Sandi during the clinic. “The exercise example we just played takes about 2 hours to complete with all the stickings and transpositions”.  The SCV Front Line is crazy consistent, crazy strong and has crazy endurance.  The exercises are the typical chords, scales and arpeggios, but taken to an extreme of re-voicing and transposition so that they take hours to play beginning to end.  The material is all more exotic-sounding than usual, which keeps it interesting to listen to hour after hour.   They play what I surmised to be about 5 times more music than the rest of the corps in the summer.  They can only get the show so good without the full ensemble, and they can’t play with them while drill is being set, so they have time to rock 2-hour long exercises and learn all-new pieces while they wait for everyone else to be ready.  In addition to that they are all college percussion majors and individually are total knock-out performers already.

What do you get when you combine great players with teamwork, leadership, and discipline?  Winners.

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So those are my big PASIC 2012 takeaways.  I saw more stuff than that and lot of it was really good, but these are the things that will color my life for at least the next 12 months.  I do my very best to never miss PASIC, because without the immersion and the experience of what’s happening right now, it’s easy to forget how fast our field is moving, changing and growing.