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Music open thread: Concertos for unpitched percussion [1]
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Date: 2025-03-31
A couple of weeks ago, in the open thread about the xylophone, I mentioned klezmer percussionist Elaine Hoffman Watts, whose father, Jacob Hoffman, was a renowned xylophonist. The Hoffmans are Ukrainian Jews, and Elaine Hoffman Watts traces her musical lineage in klezmer through her father and grandfather, and maybe also more distant ancestors.
As far as I can tell, she only plays the drum set, which has a more or less standard configuration: cymbals (ride, crash and hi-hat), rack toms and floor toms, snare drum and bass drum, with pedal mallets for the bass drum and floor toms. Correction: esquimaux pointed out in the comments that floor toms are generally played with drum sticks, not pedal mallets.
So far in these open threads, I’ve only covered instruments of definite pitch. If you strike a bar of a xylophone with a mallet, you’re going to get a definite pitch, like for example B-flat. Or it might be slightly off from the pitch it’s supposed to be. Even if it’s in tune, the tone quality of that sound might not be optimal if you use the wrong mallet, but there won’t be any doubt about the pitch, which can be adjusted if necessary. If you want that note in your composition, you have to position it correctly on a 5-line staff, and mind key signatures and accidentals.
An animated GIF of a claymation monkey, dressed as a pirate, sighing in annoyance before rolling his eyes and performing a rimshot on a drum set. Would you describe the three notes of a rimshot as low, medium and high?
With instruments of indefinite pitch, you don’t get a distinct pitch, but in many cases it is possible and sometimes very easy to describe the pitch as being high (such as with the triangle) or low (such as with the bass drum).
In The Technique of Orchestration, Kent Wheeler Kennan advises composers and arrangers not to rely on the timpani (which has definite pitch) to fill in any note of a harmony alone. An instrument of indefinite pitch, like the bass drum, however, can sometimes be made to sound as if it has definite pitch by having it play in the same rhythm as certain instruments of definite pitch, such as maybe the cellos. Even so, there’s a line in Whiplash which I think got past the technical consultants: “Tune the kit to a B-flat”? Apparently, this is a thing you can actually do for musically valid reasons, and not just asserting your dominance over some less experienced player like in that movie.
The term “unpitched” is a bit misleading, but you will find it in some places. But maybe not the Finale 2010 Add or Delete Instrument(s) dialog box. But you will find the categories Pitched Percussion (which includes instruments like the xylophone and the timpani), Percussion (instruments like triangle, cymbals, cowbell and brake drum), Drums (which includes drum set, snare drum and bass drum but not brake drum), Marching Percussion (which includes snareline, cymbal line and somewhat improbably marimba and timpani) and Handbells. The Orff Instruments category also includes a few percussion instruments.
A screenshot of Finale 2010 showing the Add or Delete Instrument(s) dialog box, with all the instruments in the Drums category selected and added to the list of instruments.
By default, some of these instruments have 5-line staves with the indefinite pitch clef and some have single-line staves also with the indefinite pitch clef. None of them should have key signatures, unlike the pitched percussion instruments. Some of the noteheads you can put in have me scratching my head, wondering if professional percussionists would be just as confused as I am. Like, does a drum set player really expect an X notehead on the space just below the staff to mean hi-hat foot?
Screenshot of Finale working on an untitled percussion score.
The ordering of the instruments can also be adjusted (it doesn’t always match what you’d expect in, for example, a score in which a composer like Haydn or Beethoven uses “Turkish” percussion). But for this silly little demo, I didn’t want to bother changing any defaults.
Very recently I came across the Konzertstück für Snare-Drum und Orchester by Áskell Másson. I am still a little uncertain of the exact original title, but I had been aware of some discrepancies in the naming of some percussion instruments in German. When Gustav Mahler writes for ein kleine Trommel or ein Rührtrommel, did he really mean snare drum or did he mean some similar drum? So Másson preferred to avoid the ambiguity and just use the English name for the instrument.
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The Bass Drum Concerto by Gabriel Prokofiev is interesting enough, but I don’t know. I’ve listened to it a few times, and it just doesn’t stick with me. But at least it led me to Hristo Yotsov’s Concerto for Drum Set and Orchestra, which I found immediately rewarding.
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Igor Falecki’s performance of this concerto is also on YouTube, it’s a good performance. Should the soloist be to the left or to the right of the conductor? I’m not sure. I suppose it’s up to the conductor and the soloist.
The open thread question: What is your favorite music with solos for unpitched percussion?
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