Adaptations of Performance Techniques for the Total Percussionist

Throughout much of music history, it was common for percussionists to specialize in one or two genres of music performance due to restrictions such as cultural relevance, geography, and the desire for simplicity. In today’s eclectic music industry however, few musicians can go their entire careers without some level of exposure to multiple musical styles or genres. The advantage of this kind of exposure is that musicians expand the range of their overall capabilities. This inevitably empowers them to utilize the skills that they have learned in multiple styles in almost any musical setting that they may encounter. The purpose of this study is to improve one’s ability to learn and master percussion repertoire more quickly and efficiently through showing that this can be done through the cultivation of skills and techniques in multiple styles of percussion performance. The focus is on jazz (drum set/vibraphone), orchestral music, world music, and marching percussion. There will be an examination of multiple solo percussion pieces that incorporate different musical genres within the context of a concert solo to demonstrate the importance of mastering the skills and techniques from these different genres. In addition to this preliminary research, I have interviewed two professional percussionists, each of whom have experience with most of the genres previously mentioned but focus their career on at least one of them. The purpose of these interviews is to gain insight into how and why each percussionist uses the skills from each genre that they have studied in their field of specialization as well as the advantages of being a well-rounded percussionist as opposed to an individual that only performs in one style or genre of music.