Life
Biography and Education
Becker was born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he was a student of percussionist James Betz. Betz initially taught Becker marimba, but soon expanded to lessons in snare drum, piano and music theory. [1] After high school, Becker left Allentown to enroll in the Eastman School of Music, where he studied percussion performance with William Street and John Beck, and composition with Warren Benson and Aldo Provenzano. Becker holds a Bachelor of Music degree with Distinction and a Master of Music in Performance and Literature degree from Eastman. [2]
Upon completing his undergraduate and graduate studies, Becker enrolled in a four-year world music program at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he studied with world percussionists Prawotosaputo, Sumarsam, and Freeman Donkor, as well as tabla instructor Sharda Sahai and African drum instructor Abraham Adzenyah. [3]
In high school, Becker showed an interest in jazz drumming, which he had pursued in college as a performer of bebop. [4] As a contemporary of drummers like Steve Gadd, Becker eventually changed his focus toward marimba and orchestral percussion. As an orchestral percussionist and timpanist, Becker has performed with several groups, including the Marlboro Festival Orchestra, Kirov Ballet, and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. [5]
In the 1970s, during the Marlboro Music Festival, Becker met with members of the nascent Nexus percussion ensemble, showing a shift of interest from orchestral performance toward ensemble and chamber music performance. [4] Nexus has toured throughout North America, Asia and Europe, and has performed with groups such as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony. [5] Becker has also performed with the ensemble Steve Reich and Musicians and the Paul Winter Consort. [4] Becker currently remains as an ensemble performer with Nexus.
Nexus and Percussion Literature
As a percussion ensemble, Nexus is one of the leading performance groups in new music. According to Becker, the group initially focused on works that featured improvisation. [6] Repertoire soon expanded to works of more established composers, like Steve Reich and John Cage, who are attributed to forming the foundation of a post-modernist percussion repertoire. [7] Reich's work in particular is effective for this ensemble because of Becker's involvement with a vast majority of Reich's percussion works as a member of his ensemble. [5]
Another major element in the repertoire of Nexus is world music, which was introduced to the group through the experience of both Bob Becker and Russell Hartenberger in the world music program at Wesleyan University. [8] Members of the ensemble, including Becker, also contribute to the repertoire through their own compositions, which "are now important standards in the percussion literature repertoire." [9]
In terms of instrumentation, the ensemble selects works that are practical to perform on tour. Works by Cage are better suited to this need because the request for ambiguous timbres ("something that rattles," for example) means that the ensemble can work with a variety of options based on what they bring for other works. [10] Another composition in their repertoire that works well on tour is Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood, which works well because of the portability of the instrumentation but also fits with the ensemble's repertoire of percussion standards. [11] Other compositions in the ensemble's repertory often feature the strengths of the individual members, including two (Becker and Hartenberger) who are very proficient mallet players and the entire ensemble in terms of world percussion. [12]
Compositional output
Style and influences of Becker as a composer
As a composer, Becker is influenced by his world music education at Wesleyan, more specifically from his understanding of North Indian Classical, or Hindustani, music. The Hindustani style of composition is based primarily on raga scales as the method of pitch organization. [13] The style focuses on communicating certain rasas, or moods, while allowing the performer to freely interpret those rasas through their own virtuosity. [14] In terms of form, the Hindustani style tends to focus on a development "from static to ecstatic," featuring a drone followed by virtuosic, highly rhythmic content that fluctuates freely from metered to unmetered moments. [15] There is also a tendency to initiate a composition in a slow tempo, and end it in a fast tempo. [16]
The role of tabla drumming, something that Becker features either literally or through snare drumming, has many facets, but is in place primarily as a time keeper. [17] The role then transforms into something more like a dialogue between the tabla and the main melodic component. [18] Becker uses this phase to introduce his "'melodic' snare drumming," and military-based rudimental drumming, revealing a multicultural aesthetic in his music. [5]
Lahara
One of Becker's first compositions, Lahara is a prime example of Becker's multicultural style. Written for solo drum with melodic and drone accompaniment, this work employs the previously noted blend of Hindustani practice with rudimental drumming idioms. The solo drummer provides the tabla, yet retains its identity as a solo snare drummer who features his ability to perform standard American rudiments in context of a performance. [19] This creates a contrast of "the metrical rhythms of traditional military music" against "the apparently ametrical rhythms of [Hindustani] music." [20] Lasting approximately 30 minutes, the work also points to Becker's experience with the minimalist works of Reich, which also share in a sense of multicultural influence. (See the Welch article in Further Reading for more details.) Percussion journalist Geary Larrick also notes the influence of Bob Becker as a performer in the work, noting the indications for sticking patterns are "quite realistic and practical." [21]
Mudra
A major work for percussion quintet, Mudra is another example of how Becker fuses military drumming style within the context of Hindustani practices. He employs both the tactics and melodic constructions that come from North Indian Classical music. [22] Within this frame, Becker uses western drums in a tabla-like fashion, but employs rudimental ideas. The concept of building out of stasis in Hindustani music is used to establish a motif which builds on itself and sets up the sometimes chaotic presence of the snare drum, which focuses more on the melodic and soloistic functions of tabla drumming. While not as long as Lahara, Mudra also shows inklings of minimalism that is part of Becker's overall style. This work is a reorchestrated version of a larger work called Urbhana Mudra, which was written as a percussion quartet with choreography. [23]
Away Without Leave
In Away Without Leave, Becker draws upon traditional rudimental snare drumming that features both military and samba rhythms. [24] This is a work that does not feature the Hindustani style, showing an expansion of Becker's multicultural influence to Latin America. This work also shows a connection to jazz drummer and colleague Steve Gadd, as this work is influenced by Gadd's composition Duke's Lullaby. [25]
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and cordophone.
Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer who is known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." For example, his early works experiment with phase shifting, in which one or more repeated phrases plays slower or faster than the others, causing it to go "out of phase." This creates new musical patterns in a perceptible flow.
The vibraphone is a percussion instrument in the metallophone family. It consists of tuned metal bars and is typically played by using mallets to strike the bars. A person who plays the vibraphone is called a vibraphonist,vibraharpist, or vibist.
Music for 18 Musicians is a work of minimalist music composed by Steve Reich during 1974–1976. Its world premiere was on April 24, 1976, at The Town Hall in the Midtown Manhattan Theater District. Following this, a recording of the piece was released on the ECM New Series in 1978.
A percussion ensemble is a musical ensemble consisting of only percussion instruments. Although the term can be used to describe any such group, it commonly refers to groups of classically trained percussionists performing primarily classical music. In America, percussion ensembles are most commonly found at conservatories, though some professional groups, such as Nexus and So Percussion exist. Drumlines and groups who regularly meet for drum circles are two other forms of the percussion ensemble.
Nexus is a Toronto-based percussion ensemble that performs standard percussion ensemble repertoire, ragtime music, world music, contemporary classical music and as a group, has performed as soloist with some of the top orchestras around the world.
Sextet is a composition by American composer Steve Reich. The piece was written and first performed in 1984, and slightly revised in 1985.
Steve Reich and Musicians, sometimes credited as the Steve Reich Ensemble, is a musical ensemble founded and led by the American composer Steve Reich. The group has premiered and performed many of Reich's works both nationally and internationally. In 1999, Reich received a Grammy Award for "Best Small Ensemble Performance " for the ensemble's performance of Music for 18 Musicians.
Mitchell Thomas Peters was a principal timpanist and percussionist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He composed well-known pieces for the marimba such as "Yellow After the Rain" and "Sea Refractions"; it is said that these works were composed because Peters felt that there was a lack of musically interesting material that would introduce his students to four-mallet marimba techniques.
Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (2000) is a song cycle in seven movements by the composer György Ligeti based on poetry by Sándor Weöres. The work is scored for mezzo-soprano and an unusual ensemble of percussion and wind instruments. The lyrics are whimsical and often nonsensical, sometimes combining random Hungarian words or parts of words into a nonsense language.
Stuart Saunders Smith is an American composer and percussionist. After having studied composition and music theory at three music institutions, Smith is currently based in Vermont, United States, with his wife Sylvia. He has produced almost 200 compositions, half of which were written for percussion instruments with a focus on the vibraphone.
Matthias Dahms is a German virtuoso vibraphone and marimba soloist, percussionist and composer. He has been a percussion soloist ever since 1990, giving concerts and drum courses and mallet-instrument classes in Europe as well as overseas.
Drumming is a piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich, dating from 1970–1971. Reich began composition of the work after a short visit to Ghana and observing music and musical ensembles there, especially under the Anlo Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. His visit was cut short after contracting malaria. Classical music critic K. Robert Schwarz describes the work as "minimalism's first masterpiece".
Luigi Morleo is an Italian percussionist and composer of contemporary music, who lives in Bari and teaches at the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory.
Peter Jarvis is an American percussionist, drummer, conductor, composer, music copyist, print music editor and college professor.
Emmanuel Séjourné is a French composer and percussionist, and head of percussion at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. His music is influenced by Western classical music and by popular music.
Charles "Charley" Wilcoxon was an American drum teacher and drum method book writer. He wrote several influential books on rudimental drumming that are still used by drum teachers today. He is a member of the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
Daktari is an album by drummer Shelly Manne recorded in 1967 featuring music from Daktari and released on the Atlantic label. On the album, Mike Wofford plays a tack piano to evoke an African sound, and Manne is joined by percussionists Emil Richards, Larry Bunker, Frank Carlson, and Victor Feldman. According to the liner notes, Manne and fellow percussionists play ankle and wrist jingles, Thai mouth organs, angklungs, ocarinas, vibraphones, tympani, and different kinds of marimbas.
Andy Akiho is an American musician and composer of contemporary classical music. A virtuoso percussionist based in New York City, his primary performance instrument is steel pans. He took interest in becoming a percussionist when his older sister introduced him to a drum set at the age of 9. Akiho first tried his hand at the steel pan when he became an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina. He began taking several trips to Trinidad after college to learn and play music. From there, he started writing pieces of his own.
Morris Goldenberg was an American percussionist, music teacher, and method book author. He wrote several books on orchestral snare drumming, mallet percussion, and timpani. He is a member of the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
