Unpopular Music Percussion Music? "Well, that wasn't as bad as I thought it might be." This was a comment I overheard as the audience left the concert hall following a performance by NEXUS - five professional percussionists in our 4th decade of performances together in venues all over the world. This particular concert took place somewhere in middle America, but the comment could have occurred almost anywhere in the world after any one of the NEXUS concerts. Strangely enough, even with many dozens of NEXUS performances in our background by the time the comment was made, I understood exactly why that person in the audience might have had some pre-concert doubts about a program of music performed entirely on percussion instruments: percussion means drums; drums are loud; drums don't play melodies, drums play rhythms. Will the concert consist of 90-minutes of rhythms? The kind of music upon which NEXUS had established a successful career was certainly far removed from the music to which most people might ever be exposed, so there was almost no way for anyone who hadn't already heard the music of NEXUS to have a clear idea about what they would be hearing in a NEXUS concert. The music of NEXUS is indeed performed primarily on percussion instruments, and in the larger world of music, percussion music is but a tiny niche within several layers of musical niches, all of which are pretty far removed from the mass market mainstream - a mainstream that might be characterized as a musical-industrial complex of genres supported by record companies, copyright conglomerates, distribution entities, managers, agents, publicists, etc. - all of which are primarily focused on a single goal: to attract the widest possible number of consumers and thereby to generate as much money as possible. In order to achieve this end, at least in the mainstream of the industrialized world, music essentially becomes a commodity, even though there are certainly many dedicated performing artists producing music that touches the sensibilities of a wide cross-section of the world's human population. Mainstream music in western cultures in the beginning of the twenty-first century is not a singular entity. Rather it is a hodgepodge of popular musical genres, such as Rock, Pop, Country, Broadway, Latin, Rap, Film music, Folk music and more. These musical forms have in common that the lyrics associated with each form are central in helping to make the music accessible to as wide a cross section of listeners as possible. In fact, the lyrics are generally the most important element in determining a song's success in the marketplace. If the lyrics are paired with an engaging melody, so much the better. By contrast, instrumental music - music without lyrics, pure music - makes up a relatively small part in the mainstream of music, even to the extreme of another young listener's comment that I once overheard: "I don't like listening to music that doesn't have words." Around the edges of the mainstream musical forms is "art music," much of which is instrumental or "absolute" music - music without words - requiring that listeners acquire some degree of experience or understanding in order to appreciate it. This genre includes the music of symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles of all types, jazz ensembles, world music ensembles and an infinite number of crossover mixes of these. Among the niches in the classical chamber music genre, there are niches associated with historic periods - Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, etc. - and niches devoted to instrumental ensembles such as string quartets, woodwind quintets, contemporary/avant garde mixed instrument groups, and single instrument groups - saxophone quartets, trombone choirs, and percussion ensembles. This last group, which includes NEXUS, forms a niche that generally finds its core devotees and listeners in music schools and conservatories, and this market, which at its core is comprised mainly of present and former instrumental music students, is significant but is still of woefully insufficient size to sustain even a handful of full time careers. However, a small number of percussion ensembles - for example, Kroumata in Sweden or Percussions des Strasbourg in France or the Blackearth group and NEXUS in North America - came very close to building full time careers as performing ensembles, but the members of these groups still depended to some extent upon supplemental sources of income to make ends meet. For the first few seasons of NEXUS in the 1970s, there was virtually no income at all from the group's performances, so the question is, how was the ensemble able to sustain itself? The key was that all of the NEXUS members relied on other sources of income - performing as full time or part time members of symphony orchestras, teaching in music schools, and playing various kinds of freelance stand alone gigs. At this early stage NEXUS was entirely subsidized by the members themselves, who were all driven not by money - and certainly not by a quest for fame - but simply by the excitement of exploring new musical territories, and developing distinctive musical voices; drummers marching to the beat of their own distinct kind of drumming. The Percussion Music Environment When NEXUS presented its first concert in 1971 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York the classical/art music repertoire of music for percussion instruments was minimal - almost nonexistent. A few works, like Les Noces (1923) by Igor Stravinsky, Ionisation (1929-1931) by Edgard Varése, or Toccata (1942) by Carlos Chavez had managed to achieve some recognition among classical music cognoscenti, but even so, these compositions were mostly viewed by musicologists, music critics and audiences as eccentric at best. In the early 1920s musicians such as George Hamilton Green and others had briefly achieved a significant worldwide following through their many recordings on xylophone in the era of acoustic cylinder and disc records. Their success was in large part derived from the familiar popular music that they chose to play. Though Green's career began with a few recordings of classical opera overtures arranged for solo xylophone with orchestra or band accompaniment, it was his later recordings of popular dance music that gave him the widest public recognition. By the mid-20th century some very creative works for percussion instruments by composers such as John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Harry Partch had emerged, but then faded to be performed only rarely, though they would eventually find a revival in 1970s. With the introduction of Hi-Fi LP records in the 1950s, a small genre of recordings featuring percussion emerged. The wider range of dynamics and frequencies that are produced by percussion instruments served mainly to demonstrate the technical improvements in sound quality made possible by the new stereo Hi-Fi recording process. The music on virtually all of the Hi-Fi recordings which featured percussion consisted of arrangements of popular songs and show tunes. The 1960s ushered in the development of conservatory and college percussion ensembles, giving percussion students new performance opportunities with a new repertoire that was being written mostly by student composers and by percussionists themselves. By the time of the first NEXUS concert in 1971, the group's members were largely influenced by their studies of orchestral symphonic music in their student days, and by their experiences as young professional orchestra musicians. It was a deep emotional connection with symphonic music that gave NEXUS the audacity to imagine that it might be possible to create similar emotional and intellectual responses in music produced solely on percussion instruments. Other critical factors affected the formation of NEXUS. Commercial jet travel had only recently become widely available, so that people could more easily travel to distant places and be exposed to unfamiliar forms of music in its natural setting. Conversely, it became much easier for musicians and ensembles from distant cultures to tour virtually anywhere in the world to present their music. In the 1920s it took over a week for the British conductor, Albert Coates, to travel from London, England to Rochester, New York by steamship and railroad. By 1971 the same trip by commercial jet made it not only possible, but also normal to have breakfast in London and dinner in Rochester later on the same day. At the same time, access to the world's diversity of music became more widely available because of the increased availability of high quality LP (long playing) disc records. Record producers could more easily travel to remote locations with increasingly compact recording equipment to record music in its natural setting. The LP records also allowed for up to 30-minutes of uninterrupted music on each side of the disc, which was considerably more than the 4-minutes-per-side limitation of the pre-LP technologies. A significant acceleration in the ease and volume of world trade was also underway, and new possibilities were becoming available for obtaining percussion instruments from distant cultures through catalog retailers like Steve Weiss Music in Philadelphia and Asian Sound in Germany. The Globalization of Music In 1971 the category, "World Music," hadn't even been...
