In my last blog post about summer festivals, I suspected I had missed some – and I certainly did! NEXUS’ own Bob Becker is in Fairbanks, Alaska, this week for the Alaska Midnight Sun Chamber Percussion Intensive. Morris Palter is co-faculty with Bob. It’s part of the two-week long Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.
In two weeks NEXUS will be performing two concerts at the 18th annual Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival. The Festival takes place in some of the city’s most beautiful churches and heritage sites both indoors and out. Concert-goers can start their day as early as 10 AM and attend the last concert of the day at the “late-night lounge”, which gets underway at 10:30 PM. NEXUS will be part of one of these great late-nights on July 31st at the beautiful St Brigid’s Centre for the Arts. This follows NEXUS’ Big Birthday Concert, also on the 31st at 8 pm.
In May, 2011, John Wooton sent an email to many of his drumming friends and colleagues. In it he posed some questions about how to name a basic and historic rudiment. One of the first to respond was Dennis Delucia. There has followed a very interesting and entertaining email debate and discussion about this topic,… Read more »
“The Instrumentalist,” a magazine serving the music education marketplace, contacted me in 1999 about the possibility of writing a short article on the subject of percussion performance at the high school level. Since my college degree was in ‘Public School Music’ and since I had regularly been invited to coach high school percussionists or to… Read more »
Click HERE to read about the July 2nd Concert featuring NEXUS and the Canadian Brass in Woodstock, NY.
Click HERE for more details of the July 2, 2011 concert featuring NEXUS and the Canadian Brass in Woodstock, NY.
In many visits by NEXUS to music schools, conservatories and universities all over the world, both during my time as Principal Percussionist in the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and after, I have been regularly approached by students asking for advice on auditioning for orchestras. In my current position as an adjunct teacher at the Eastman… Read more »
From time to time it is good to be reminded how percussion has always been a part of the daily rhythms of Life. I came upon this 1938 photo in our family’s album from a fishing village in Nova Scotia. My grandfather, Billy Tom Feltmate, is on the right, shovelling earth around his newly dug… Read more »
I have just finished participating in an amazing four day percussion institute at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, right across the state line from St. Louis. According to the SIUE website, the campus is “situated on 2,660 acres of beautiful, forested woodland atop the bluffs overlooking the natural beauty of the Mississippi River’s rich bottom… Read more »
Thursday evening, June 9th, marked the 2011 presentation of the Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Composer R.Murray Schafer was one of this year’s recipients. The multi-talented Schafer was honoured for his internationally-acclaimed “achievements as a composer, educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual artist and provocateur”. Schafer is a prolific composer and has written works… Read more »
While some of the NEXUS team are catching a bit of rare down-time here and there, others are off on recording sessions and tours in various locales. It is hard to keep track of them but Bob Becker wrote to me today from California, and Garry Kvistad is near St. Louis MO as part of… Read more »
NEXUS celebrates its 40th birthday this coming weekend! Entering its 41st season, NEXUS is looking back at a tremendously satisfying 40th season that began with their exciting new commission from Steve Reich,
In March, 2010, I received a request from graduate student Bruce Salyers to answer some questions about my drum solo New-thaan, which is included in NEXUS Portfolio for Snare Drum, published by HoneyRock. Bill Cahn recently posted his answers to similar questions about some of the pieces in Portfolio, and so I thought it might… Read more »
I recently received an email from a student working on a DMA project. The email contained questions about “Afrodditty,” a piece that exists in two related versions – 1) a timpani solo in “Six Concert Pieces for Solo Timpani” (Meredith/Hal Leonard Pub.), and 2) a snare drum solo in “NEXUS Suite” (HoneyRock Pub). The two… Read more »
It’s back home again after a week of vacation in Massachusetts – Stockbridge (Red Lion Inn), the Old Deerfield Inn, Sandwich Village on Cape Cod (Daniel Webster Inn), and three days in Boston, where Ruth and I heard absolutely no live music (but plenty of Kenny G’s saxophone in almost every restaurant, cafe, and elevator;… Read more »
