Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Percussion
Louise Devenish · Directions of New Music · 2017
Developments in percussion performance practices, pedagogy, and industry are recognised as some of the major advancements to have taken place in western art music in the last century.Taking the composition dates of landmark percussion ensemble works Ritmicas No. 5 and No. 6 by Amadeo Roldán (1930) and Ionisation by Edgard Varèse as a point of departure, there are now nine decades of creative activity in this field.Although 'the relatively short history of contemporary percussion music has forced percussionists to include research in their daily routines, in order to invent and master new instruments, and to accelerate their technical development' (Huang, 2015), scholarly literature focussed on this creative research have not emerged in parallel.To date, publications focussed on percussion have been largely been confined to journal articles and dissertations.The Cambridge Companion to Percussion is one of a handful of recent book publications including The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams (Schick 2006) and The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist (Lewis & Aguilar 2014) that begin to address a gap in the literature, and is a must-have for academic and personal libraries internationally.Russell Hartenberger, editor and author of two chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Percussion, states that he hopes that this collection of essays is 'representative of the growing significance of percussion in Western music' (p.3), which this volume achieves.The Cambridge Companion to Percussion offers twenty-one essays that address a variety of percussive concerns, organised into seven chapters titled as follows: Orchestral percussion, The development of percussion instruments, Percussion in performance, Composing music for percussion instruments, Drum sets and drumming, World Percussion, and Percussion and rhythm.Commencing with an essay on historic timpani traditions, the range of topics examined spans centuries of percussion practices, however an emphasis is placed on examining developments in the twentieth century including the roots of electronic percussion, the rise of the marimba in western art music, the impact of percussion instrument design and building on performance, conducting, acoustics and the influence of world music traditions on the contemporary percussionist.