“The Instrumentalist,” a magazine serving the music education marketplace, contacted me in 1999 about the possibility of writing a short article on the subject of percussion performance at the high school level. Since my college degree was in ‘Public School Music’ and since I had regularly been invited to coach high school percussionists or to present workshops on helpful performance techniques, I decided that I would try to say something that could be helpful not only to high school percussion students, but also to educators, whose good work had been so encouraging to me when I was younger. So, instead of using the short space allotted for the article to focus on basic techniques, I decided to be more philosophical, saying something about what inspires the study of music in the first place – having fun, listening, and self-discovery through reflection.
click here to see the 3-page article: Instrumentalist ’99
