Essential Elements Percussion Book 2 Pdf
Vikki Nagindas
(Essential Elements for Band and Essential Elements Interactive are fully compatible with Essential Elements 2000)
Essential Elements for Band offers beginning students sound pedagogy and engaging music, all carefully paced to successfully start young players on their musical journey. EE features both familiar songs and specially designed exercises, created and arranged for the classroom in a unison-learning environment, as well as instrument-specific exercises to focus each student on the unique characteristics of their own instrument. EE provides both teachers and students with a wealth of materials to develop total musicianship, even at the beginning stages.
Books 1 and 2 also include access to Essential Elements Interactive (EEi), the ultimate online music education resource - anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Go to essentialelementsinteractive.com to learn more!
Method features:
Private lessons are available in brass, strings, woodwinds, guitar, percussion and voice. Our private lesson program offers 10 or 6 lessons. New this summer: Music theory classes introduce students to the basic elements and notional conventions of music. These building blocks of musical grammar provide the foundation for further explorations in harmony, history, counterpoint, and analysis. Cost varies.
Contact: c...@mozart.sc.edu or 803-777-5381.
The participants in Speak Percussion's Emerging Artists Program for composers and percussionists jotted down their impressions immediately after an action-packed Creative Development Week in December. In the Emerging Artists Program, a mentor and peer supported each young composer in creating sketches for a new composition that was workshopped during the week. A rehearsal period and final performances of the resulting new works will take place in April 2011.
The inaugural Speak Percussion Emerging Artists Program is now halfway complete and has already exceed our expectations. Our goal was to create a highly focussed environment where talented emerging artists could take big risks and delve deeply into the art of percussion composition. It was essential to establish a nurturing environment where mistakes and new problems would be both encouraged and embraced. Through such challenges came a wealth of material that extended our notions of acoustic, notational and conceptual percussive phenomena.
Central to this program has been the crucial relationship between performers and composers, not only as the platform for knowledge-sharing and troubleshooting but, more importantly, as an opportunity to create trust, cross-pollinate creativity and establish advocates of each others' work. We formed such collaborative teams, and these became the mechanism through which the artists developed their work. Each team was a carefully selected coupling of composer and percussionist, with regular support from the Speak Percussionists and composition lecturer Thomas Meadowcroft.
The structure of this program is such that the first of two meetings was framed as a Creative Development Week. Through this week, our emphasis was placed on possibility and dreams and hence pathways towards realising them. There was no emphasis on completed or fixed ideas, and this left the opportunity for the composers to revise and finally confidently complete their compositions afterwards.
During this program I have been inspired by our 10 Emerging Artists, each with a distinct and fearless approach to contemporary music. The level of openness and enthusiasm was unwavering, and the quality and genuine engagement with the tasks at hand were of the highest degree.
What I think has been really productive about the 'Speak Percussion' workshop is that each of the composers have been teamed up with one of the percussionists right from the outset of the course. This has meant that the workshop has been run with the 'practical' part of composition in mind (i.e. the testing of sounds, working on new notation with players, discovering new sounds and forms together), as well as making for a collegial atmosphere where composer and performer are at ease to share ideas and experiences. Composers chewing the fat on academic issues for a few days and then some ensemble dropping by to sight-read through the scores (as can sometimes be the case with these kinds of workshops) has thus been happily avoided in favour of relationships between peers. In turn, it is hoped that these relationships will continue in the (professional) future, after the course is finished.
Week Speak, instalment one.
Emerging artist status, check. Butterflies in stomach, check. Bouncy bright yellow top to boost my confidence, check. Umbrella, check. Okay, ready to meet some people.
I had the exciting chance in early December of being part of the Emerging Artists program run by Speak Percussion for young percussionists and composers. I was already a big fan of Speak, and the chance to work with composers who would not only want to write for percussion but would be actually interested in the ideas of percussionists was very, very cool. I arrived at VCA Secondary School twenty minutes early on the first day, all pumped and ready to go.
The first day is always pretty scary. At least the program was held in my home city, in which I am lucky. I've never been an emerging artist before, so having a familiar location made the leap a substantial bit easier. Introductions happened in almost no time: most of us got there twenty minutes or so early. Of course this would change through the week, but it was nice to meet people on the first day before the formalities began. Before long they had us rolling about on the floor playing the game 'machines', where you form groups and pretend to be a machine together. When you look around the room and see the artistic director and the lauded guest composer crawling on their hands and knees, you know this week is going to be fun. And you try to outdo them in looking like a fool.
The group activities were wonderful. Getting-to-know-you games are so much fun when you give yourself permission to be as silly as you like, which everybody did. The talks and forums with both Eugene Ughetti and Thomas Meadowcroft were enlightening, inspiring and empowering. My favourites were the ones where the mentors told us their personal stories, showed us their work, and gave us a glimpse of what it must be like to be them. After all, all of us want to be them. It's true, even if only a little. I am still astounded by the loneliness they must have gone through during all the in-between times where things weren't going well. We're always warned that success can't come without failure, but I've never quite appreciated how much failure can hurt. We got to see the human side of celebrity.
I must admit, I was scared of the composer-percussionist collaboration. When I received my score about a week before the program began, I thought I could never have anything to contribute. My collaborator's writing personality was completely different to mine, it was all drumming and rhythms, some cool stuff, but I confess that I didn't look into it very deeply. It wasn't my project, it was his. By the end of the week, we had both opened up to each other and talked about life, music and the percussion piece we were supposed to be working on, and we both had a lot to say. By the end of the week, we had begun to learn to express what we had to say together.
There was a wonderfully casual atmosphere within the group. Everybody felt free to speak up and to contribute, everybody was respected. Yet, there were no lapses in focus or attention. Everybody was switched on the entire time. Also, the food we had at the Malthouse Theatre was very delicious. Conclusion: the week was all-round amazing.
The Speak Percussion Emerging Artists program has been the most engaging and exciting program of its type that I have ever been involved in. I was somewhat unsure of what to expect and did my best to prepare a complete piece for the program. This program is unusual among composition programs as there is a strong focus on collaborative development; each composer is paired with an emerging artist who is a percussionist and we develop our pieces together.
My collaborator, Madi Chwasta, had told me that her strengths lay in the keyboard percussion instruments, however, as my piece developed, I realised that I did not want the piece to be pitch-centric. The first collaborative session was rather nerve-wracking as I had no idea what it would be like to work with Madi. Madi turned out to be a perfect match, approaching the unconventional notation and techniques that I had employed with musicality and enthusiasm.
Over the course of the five days we made a number of large decisions about how the piece should evolve and work, and having had the luxury of such an intensive workshopping period, I feel that I will be able to easily realise my aims within the piece.
One of the things that I became very aware of was that I needed to integrate the concept behind the piece into the piece more strongly in the form, the notation system and the instrumentation. This is something that I would not have been able to see so clearly had I not had this opportunity to realise sections of the piece during the writing period.
I also found this experience to be very valuable, due to the exposure to the other artists working in the program. All four of the other composers presented ideas and techniques that intrigued me and stimulated my creative imagination. I look forward to hearing how each of these pieces will have evolved in the second week of the program.
The first week of the Speak Percussion Emerging Artists Program was inspiring, fun and creative. One of the best parts of the program was the collaboration between the percussionists and composers. Each composer was partnered with a percussionist which allowed a close dialogue between the two. As a violinist, and not knowing a lot about writing for percussion, this partnership helped me learn and opened my eyes to many things, including the notation of specific techniques and experimenting with 'found' instruments.
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