Many children's first experiences of music-making will be through percussion, as I am seeing first-hand with my own ten-month-old daughter: already she loves her maracas and has taken to samba band leadership as if our living room were the Copacabana. She has also just learned to clap (apparently a little late, so my baby development app tells me – I'm not too worried), and I wonder if the catalyst for this was a recent Bach to Baby performance by a brass group from the London Mozart Players, enthusiastically received by a group of children and parents in a south London festival tent.
This issue of MT has a percussion focus, showcasing its range and versatility: from low-cost body percussion in primary schools (page 36) to the high-end performance of musicians like former BBC Young Musician winner Adrian Spillett, now head of percussion at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (interviewed on page 26). A group of students led by Spillett recently performed a programme of Stockhausen and Xenakis at the Festival Ibérico de Música de Badajoz in Spain – a long way from shaking a maraca!
Then there is the journey from hitting or shaking to tuned percussion, and the breadth of skills that requires. Here, it is clear how developing all-round musical skills is always important, for every young musician, and from as early as possible: to progress from drum kit to xylophone or glockenspiel takes encouragement from a teacher, but will be much easier for a student who is already proficient in reading music, and has a strong understanding of tonality as well as rhythm.
As percussion teacher Lauren Kosty observes on page 28, although most students will come to her wanting to learn the drum kit, early exposure prevents tuned instruments from becoming an intimidating blockade to be overcome (or not) in future: all-round musicianship keeps pupils’ options open, and can be developed from the beginning with instruments as simple as Boomwhackers or Wak-a-Tubes in a diatonic scale.
Since most students will not happen to have a vibraphone at home, and while drum technique is still central, opportunities to develop broad musical skills therefore become all the more important. Needless to say, those skills will serve them well.
