I stand at the kitchen counter holding a pair of slender hickory drumsticks I haven’t used in four-plus decades. My 35-year-old nephew, a middle school band director, has told me that no one holds drumsticks the way I was taught—the left hand turned up, thumb up, stick lying in the webbing between thumb and index finger, index finger loosely wrapped around; the right palm turned down, stick between thumb and forefinger.
The traditional grip, they call it. Military drummers used it, and jazz drummers. But nowadays, my nephew says, drummers exclusively use the match grip—both palms facing down, like the right hand in the traditional grip. What tympanists use on the big (as they used to be called) kettle drums, which I also used to play. Or on the xylophone and marimba.
I look up the grips online—as one can do nowadays—and I read that the match grip uses twice the arm muscles as the traditional grip, “allowing for more control and power. Match grip is literally physiologically superior,” it says.
Just reading that makes my hands ache.
What am I doing, heading back to a community college night band at age 67 and (almost) a half? I promised myself four years ago that, after retirement, I would do things I hadn’t had time to do as an always-teaching, never-idle college professor. Take an art class or at least try to swash watercolors across paper just for fun. Pick up music again. Go back to a band—concert or symphonic since I am not a jazz drummer, though I love jazz.
And there’s a reason now in the family. Sort of. My nephew the band director is married to a woman whose sister runs the music program at a nearby community college. Molly, the college band director, is a Ph.D. stand-up jazz bass player, who like her father, is now running a music program. Molly’s father, Clay, played saxophone in the night junior college band my sister and I played in as high school and early college students. Clay went on to become a doctor of music and teaches at the university down the street where I went to school long ago and where my nephew, the band director, got his degree in music education.
As they say, family is complicated, but in this case we are all musically related.
Molly started a nighttime jazz band at this community college couple of years ago, thinking, correctly, that musicians and music teachers in the area could come play together one evening a week. She’s done the same thing with a symphonic band. And her father Clay has joined both bands as a percussionist.
The first time I saw him behind a vibraphone in the jazz band, I about fell over. “You’re playing vibes?” I said, stating the obvious at the end of a pop-up jazz band concert in the college library a couple of years ago.
“Yeah,” he said a bit sheepishly. “I’m learning.”
Music professors have to learn to play every instrument, at least a little, so they can advise their students. So Clay must have had some percussion experience. And over the past couple of years, attending Molly’s bands’ performances, I’ve been impressed watching Clay’s progress as a percussionist—especially at the most recent concert when he was playing tympani quite well in the symphonic band.
And besides, just before that concert, at Thanksgiving at my nephew and niece-in-law’s house, I talked to both Molly and Clay about joining the symphonic band. “Do it!” they both urged. And so, after lots of challenges trying to negotiate my former college district’s insane online registration system (always a problem for my former students, too), I have officially enrolled in my first community college class in more than 40 years.
The first band class is next Thursday, and I have no idea how to prepare. Percussionists play whatever the music calls for, often pieces that involve a lot of counting measures of rest, waiting to come in here and there. Or they can require, say, a tricky bells or xylophone part, a run up the keyboard with two mallets held in, yes, the match grip. Don’t ask me to try four mallets on a marimba.
Honestly, I hope I end up on the bass drum. Or a triangle. I can probably handle a triangle. I have one at home. I can practice that.
In the meantime, I have recovered my heavy-duty metal music stand from the garage, dusted it off and set it in front of my marimba, which usually slumbers under a few layers of fabric to protect its four octaves of rosewood keys. It’s a beauty, made in the 1950s, and my mother bought it for me twenty years ago because I’d always wanted one. I found it on ebay, offered by a percussionist in Boston who’d taken lessons from one of the most famous Boston Pops percussionists back in the day. He wanted $5,000 for it, including shipping, which must have cost a fortune, since it had to be taken apart and shipped in wooden crates.
I still think it was a bargain, and, bless her, so did my mother who said she’d wished she could have afforded to buy me a marimba when I was actually playing in bands. But I went on to become a professional writer and journalist, eventually a teacher, and left music behind.
So last week I retrieved my old black stick bag from a tall bamboo basket and pulled out fuzzy tympani mallets with ends that look like falling-apart cotton balls and the skinny drumsticks and the triangle. And I am practicing on the kitchen counter—having long ago given away my practice pad and snare drum—using the match grip, then taking that same grip to the marimba where I peer over the gorgeous rosewood keys at the music on the stand and try to remember how to read music. Treble clef, the right hand on the piano. For tympani, I will have to remember bass clef—the left hand on the piano.
I don’t have a piano, so I’m picking out things on the much larger but identical keyboard that is a marimba, the overgrown xylophone that is the cousin of the metal vibraphone that Clay plays in jazz band. I used to have one of those, too. I am trying to stay loose and enjoy being a beginner again, a raw lump of human who loves music and is willing to try to play badly as my body recalls motions it used to know well. Relearning how to read music is like regaining a lost language—rather like going back to a sport that’s both physical and mental.
At this age I don’t mind walking into a band room and declaring myself a beginner, something I never would have done in the days when it was all about showing up prepared and looking competent. I’m chalking up this willingness to embrace beginner’s mind to maturity. Or perhaps it’s part of a greater life journey, a full-circle movement back to a much earlier me.
Or maybe it’s because I’m looking forward to standing at the back of a collection of people making music, adding little bits of percussion here and there, but mostly being carried away on a wave of sound that is unique every time the same parts are played. All of this will be done with a group of disparate humans who come from very different lives, working together to produce something lovely—or as at least as tunefully as they possibly can.
Güd wrtr 