Percussion
For additional resources, especially strategies for finding scores, please see the dedicated Percussion Research Guide. For drum corps, please see the Band Music Research Guide.
Recommended Books
The recommended books below include reference and general works on percussion instruments. Dictionaries and encyclopedias can be found in ML 102.P4 while bibliographies are in ML 128.P23. Meanwhile, find histories in ML 1030 and teaching methods in MT 655. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Click on the info icon to see a description.
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Encyclopedia of Percussion
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The Encyclopedia of Percussion is an extensive guide to percussion instruments, organized for research as well as general knowledge. Focusing on idiophones and membranophones, it covers in detail both Western and non-Western percussive instruments. These include not only instruments whose usual sound is produced percussively (like snare drums and triangles), but those whose usual sound is produced concussively (like castanets and claves) or by friction (like the cuíca and the lion's roar). The expertise of contributors have been used to produce a wide-ranging list of percussion topics.
Call Number: ML102.P4 E5 2007 (Music Reference)Publication Date: 2007 -
Keiko Abe: A Virtuosic Life: Her Musical Career and the Evolution of the Concert Marimba
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In the biography Keiko Abe: A Virtuosic Life, author Rebecca Kite tells the untold story of Keiko Abe's groundbreaking influence on the evolution of the marimba and its music. Kite also offers a history of the xylophone, the marimba, and the music, composers, and performers that each instrument was associated with over the centuries. Examples of rare and historic recordings are included on a CD. Keiko Abe transformed the marimba into today's five-octave solo instrument and full-fledged member of classical ensembles. Over the course of Keiko Abe's long musical career, beginning as a child prodigy at age ten, her rare gifts have garnered her recognition as a musical genius, consummate artist, innovator in her field, and composer of classical pieces of art music for her instrument. As Abe's audiences worldwide know, she is also a spellbinding performer.
Call Number: ML419.A07 K58 2007Publication Date: 2007 -
Percussion Instruments and Their History
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For many years, James Blades's famous book has been referred to as the percussionist's bible. It is established as the definitive reference work on the subject. Last updated by the author in 2005 and now back in print, this extended edition includes two additional chapters. The first covers the rise of the solo percussionist by the world's leading practitioner, Dame Evelyn Glennie who also contributes a new Foreword, while recent developments in orchestral percussion are covered by Neil Percy, Head of Timpani and Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music and Principal Percussionist of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Call Number: ML1030 .B6 2021Publication Date: 2020 -
The Cambridge Companion to Percussion
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Percussion music is both the oldest and most recent of musical genres and exists in diverse forms throughout the world. This Companion explores percussion and rhythm from the perspectives of performers, composers, conductors, instrument builders, scholars, and cognitive scientists. Topics covered include percussion in symphony orchestras from the nineteenth century to today and the development of percussion instruments in chapters on the marimba revolution, the percussion industry, drum machines, and the effect of acoustics. Chapters also investigate drum set playing and the influences of world music on Western percussion, and outline the roles of percussionists as composers, conductors, soloists, chamber musicians, and theatrical performers. Developments in scientific research are explored in chapters on the perception of sound and the evolution of musical rhythm. This book will be a valuable resource for students, percussionists, and all those who want a deeper understanding of percussion music and rhythm.
Call Number: ML1030 .C26 2016Publication Date: 2016 -
Artful Noise: Percussion Literature in the Twentieth Century
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Twentieth-century composers created thousands of original works for solo percussion and percussion ensemble. Concise and ideal for the classroom, Artful Noise offers an essential and much-needed survey of this unique literature. Percussionist Thomas Siwe organizes and analyzes the groundbreaking musical literature that arose during the twentieth century. Focusing on innovations in style and the evolution of the percussion ensemble, Siwe offers a historical overview that connects the music to scoring techniques, new instrumentation, and evolving technologies as well as world events.
Call Number: ML1030 .S58 2020Publication Date: 2020 -
Timpani and Percussion
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This fascinating book presents the history of percussion instruments from the Old Stone Age to the present day. Jeremy Montagu, a performer, historian, and curator of musical instruments, discusses common and uncommon percussion instruments from all parts of the world, tracing their development and use through the ages and across cultures. The book concludes with a wide-ranging survey of world percussion, covering instruments commonly played in schools, colleges, and orchestras. It incorporates appendices on playing techniques, technical matters, and the sociology of drummers, and is abundantly illustrated with rare images.
Call Number: ML1035 .M66 2002Publication Date: 2002 -
How to Write for Percussion: A Comprehensive Guide to Percussion Composition
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While composers and percussionists are working more closely than ever with one another, there are few resources that address this collaborative relationship in depth. However, Samuel Z. Solomon, himself a percussionist and teacher, offers a comprehensive examination of the issues that percussionists and composers encounter in How to Write for Percussion. The first edition, self-published in 2004, provided musicians and music programs the world over with practical and indispensable information about issues of notation, concert production, and much more. This new edition goes even further as Solomon offers more insights derived from his personal experience as a percussionist and teacher and from his collaborations with other musicians.
Call Number: MT40 .S82 2016Publication Date: 2016 -
Teaching Percussion
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This revision continues to set the standard in percussion instrument methods texts. Providing a comprehensive introduction to every aspect of percussion education, technique, and performance, this text helps students develop musical understanding and performance skills. The text's consistent and detailed philosophy introduces students to a refined teaching methodology, as well as a greater understanding of the learning process, by integrating contemporary concepts about experiential awareness learning.
Call Number: MT655 .C67 1997Publication Date: 1997 -
The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams
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In the beginning there was noise. Drumming, the world's most ancient instrumental tradition, re-emerged explosively in the concert music of the twentieth century as music for percussion, involving drums and many other kinds of noisemakers. The music that resulted has spanned an expressive and intellectual gamut: from Cage, Varèse, and Cowell came the first ear-splitting sounds of an American percussion revolution that began in the 1930s. The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams examines this music through the eyes of a performer. The book is a practical philosophy, looking not just at the big ideas behind these and other pieces, but also at how those ideas find expression in sound.
Call Number: MT655 .S286 2006Publication Date: 2006 -
Modern School for Mallet-Keyboard Instruments
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Modern School for Mallet-Keyboard Instruments contains materials for the development of technique, performance skill, reading ability, and musicianship on marimba, xylophone, vibraphone, bells, and chimes. Compiled by experienced teachers and performers Jim Sewrey, Ben Hans, and Tom Schneller, this book includes scalular materials, technical studies, selected excerpts from standard orchestral repertoire, etudes by the legendary Morris Goldenberg, melodic studies, and solos appropriate for recitals, juries, and auditions at the high school, college, and professional levels. This book addresses musical literacy, musicianship, performance, and technique as applied to two-mallet and four-mallet playing.
Call Number: MT655.3.S49 M6 2010Publication Date: 2010 -
Symphonic Repertoire for Keyboard Percussion: A Detailed Analysis of the Major Orchestral Keyboard Percussion Repertoire
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Principal Percussionist of the San Francisco Symphony, Chairman of Percussion Studies at the San Francisco Conservatory, and faculty member at the Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles, Jack Van Geem has provided a comprehensive performance analysis of keyboard percussion parts for the major symphonic repertoire. His easy-to-understand explanations are based on countless performances under many of the world's finest conductors. Includes parts for practice and performance.
Call Number: MT719.4.V3 S96 2008Publication Date: 2008 -
Drumming Asian America: Taiko, Performance, and Cultural Politics (eBook)
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With its dynamic choreographies and booming drumbeats, taiko has gained worldwide popularity since its emergence in 1950s Japan. Harnessed by Japanese Americans in the late 1960s, taiko's sonic largesse and buoyant energy challenged stereotypical images of Asians in America as either model minorities or sinister foreigners. While the majority of North American taiko players are Asian American, over 400 groups now exist across the US and Canada, and players come from a range of backgrounds. Using ethnographic and historical approaches, combined with in-depth performance description and analysis, this book explores the connections between taiko and Asian American cultural politics. Based on original and archival interviews, as well as the author's extensive experience as a taiko player, this book highlights the Midwest as a site for Asian American cultural production and makes embodied experience central to inquiries about identity, including race, gender, and sexuality.
Call Number: Oxford Scholarship OnlinePublication Date: 2018 -
Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (eBook)
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The drum kit has provided the pulse of popular music from before the dawn of jazz up to the present day pop charts. Kick It, a provocative social history of the instrument, looks closely at key innovators in the development of the drum kit: inventors and manufacturers like the Ludwig and Zildjian dynasties, jazz icons like Gene Krupa and Max Roach, rock stars from Ringo Starr to Keith Moon, and popular artists who haven't always got their dues as drummers, such as Karen Carpenter and J Dilla. Tackling the history of race relations, global migration, and the changing tension between high and low culture, author Matt Brennan makes the case for the drum kit's role as one of the most transformative musical inventions of the modern era. Kick It shows how the drum kit and drummers helped change modern music - and society as a whole - from the bottom up.
Call Number: Oxford Scholarship OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.