Percussionists are team players. Most work obscurely as part of an orchestra, usually at the back.
But this weekend and next, solo percussionists will take the spotlight at Lincoln Center. First in Avery Fisher Hall, Christopher Lamb, who has been principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic since 1985, played the main part in a concerto that Joseph Schwantner wrote for him, a work whose premiere he gave with the Philharmonic three years ago.Next weekend, a British percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, will give a recital at Alice Tully Hall with Philip Smith, pianist, and a solo performance at the Performing Arts Center of Purchase College of the State University of New York.
These are all unusual programs. In contrast with the wealth of piano and violin concertos - or even bassoon and trombone concertos - there are very few concertos featuring percussion. Those that do exist tend to concentrate on the timpani (a separate specialty as far as most percussionists are concerned), or on the xylophone or the xylophone's mellower cousin, the marimba, rather than take advantage of the full range of diverse devices - drums, cymbals, gongs, bells, blocks of wood, to name but a few - that make up a percussion section.
Similarly, there are not too many recital pieces for solo percussionists and not too many recitals. There are, correspondingly, not too many opportunities for percussion soloists. Indeed, Glennie is unique among solo percussionists in having an international career. Other players, like Stephen Schick, are doing excellent work as soloists in less glamorous circumstances, but most percussionists, including virtuosos like Lamb, find themselves working within an orchestra.
History partly explains the relative obscurity of percussionists. Until the 1890s, percussion instruments (leaving aside timpani, which have their own history and their own performers) played only a minor role in the orchestra. The change began with Mahler's symphonies, where bells and drums are essential to the alpine and military soundscapes and with Debussy's "Prelude a l'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," where the high chimes of antique cymbals partly define a world of enjoyment of the senses.
But it was not until the 1920s that the percussion department took on a life of its own. That was when Stravinsky scored his ballet "Les Noces" for voices, pianos and percussion and when Edgard Varese, newly arrived in New York from Paris, where he had known Debussy and Stravinsky, started writing for orchestras of wind instruments and percussion.
Varese's conception of music as "organized sound" was one key. For him, music was made not of notes but of sounds, and everything about a sound was crucial. Percussion sounds, which express themselves as sound in a particularly vivid way and may not have any defined pitch at all, gave him much of his material, and in his "Ionization" of 1929-31 he produced one of the first Western compositions for an orchestra of percussion alone.
Other impulses toward percussion-driven music came at the same time from Western exposure to the music of other cultures, especially the music of the bronze percussion orchestras of Indonesia and the drums and xylophones of Africa.
John Cage turned to the percussion ensemble in the 1930s precisely because it freed him from the Western tradition. In place of a music based on harmony, such an ensemble offered the possibility of one based on rhythm, on sound and silence.
There are practical reasons for this. A cellist, say, needs to book only two seats on an airplane, but percussionists have to take along several cases of instruments to play a work like "Zyklus." Part of the point of Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece is the wonder of a performer operating on a wide variety of soundmaking surfaces, and top percussionists, like all virtuosos, have to perform on the instruments they are used to.
But there may be cultural reasons, too, that percussionists are only now beginning to emerge as soloists. In the classical tradition, solo instrumental music is substitute singing. A violinist or a clarinetist, for example, is expected to have a voice.
The percussionist's instrument is diffused. Except in rare instances, it is not held close to the body. It is not even an "it" at all, but, instead, a congregation of instruments that make different sounds and are played in different ways. Gongs, bells and xylophones, for instance, all need their own kinds of beaters; certain drums and other instruments can be played by hand. The percussionist has, in place of a voice, a variety of actions.
This makes percussion playing good to watch. Indeed, it is a continuing paradox that the most visually arresting musicmaking in an orchestra is going on at the rear of the platform. Percussionists generally have more stage presence than string or wind players, precisely because their musicianship is so much a matter of action.
There are acoustic reasons for putting the percussionists at the back; their instruments would overpower the strings if they were placed in front, and composers generally have intended, as Mahler and Debussy surely did, for the percussion to convey an aura of distance. But as a soloist, the percussionist can at last come forward, and the athleticism of per-cuss-ion playing can be part of the experience.
Still, Schwantner puts his soloist in the conventional upstage position throughout the first and third movements of his concerto and downstage only for the central movement. If this must be partly because of acoustics, it also, as Lamb suggested in a recent interview, avoids having a great number of instruments spread in front of the strings, obscuring them and making the platform look like "a junkyard."