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What happens in a tool shed? Tinkering, fixing, clanking, and clunking. What makes the tool shed Tom’s? Tom toms, of course! Tom’s Tool Shed is an educational composition intended to teach the application of simple rhythmic combinations to beginners while learning to perform on nontraditional instruments.
And speaking of tinkering, clanking, and clunking, Chris Roode’s expandable percussion quintet for beginners has a lot of it - all around the centerpiece of four concert toms. A tribute to any do-it-yourselfer, the musicians pass around theme ideas between nontraditional instruments such as metal pipes, glass jars, and unmounted triangles. While only five players are required, this piece is intended to allow for most parts to be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled to accommodate extra players!
This piece comes as a professionally printed and bound score and includes individual parts in PDF format for printing or for tablet viewing.
Once again, as with his piece “Lattes on the House,” Chris Roode has created an excellent composition for beginning percussion ensemble. Written for five or more players (all parts could easily be doubled or tripled as needed) and scored for a mixture of traditional percussion instruments along with a few found sounds, “Tom’s Tool Shed” is an engaging and pedagogical work. Rhythmically, Roode’s piece incorporates the basic eighth- and sixteenth-note figures with which beginning percussion students should be familiar. However, by scoring the work for percussion accessories and non- traditional instruments, the piece sounds far from “typical” and performers are exposed to a broader range of sound considerations, implements, etc., which is extremely valuable in their continued study of percussion.
Both in writing and timbre, the part for four concert toms comes across as the central voice in this piece, but each of the five parts has exposed opportunities. Roode utilizes a few call-and-response passages, a short canon to layer the first statement from each instrument, and several impactful unison figures through-out the piece to vary the rhythmic texture without any single part resting for an extended period. “Tom’s Tool Shed” is set in common time with a couple of tempo changes, each appearing after a fermata. The program notes are well writ-ten to address setup and performance logistics that would make this piece easy to program and teach, even for non- percussionist band directors. It should certainly be included on any short list of excellent first percussion ensembles for middle-school percussion students.
–Josh Gottry
Percussive Notes
Vol. 54, No. 2, May 2016
What happens in a tool shed? Tinkering, fixing, clanking, and clunking. What makes the tool shed Tom’s? Tom toms, of course! Tom’s Tool Shed is an educational composition intended to teach the application of simple rhythmic combinations to beginners while learning to perform on nontraditional instruments.
And speaking of tinkering, clanking, and clunking, Chris Roode’s expandable percussion quintet for beginners has a lot of it - all around the centerpiece of four concert toms. A tribute to any do-it-yourselfer, the musicians pass around theme ideas between nontraditional instruments such as metal pipes, glass jars, and unmounted triangles. While only five players are required, this piece is intended to allow for most parts to be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled to accommodate extra players!
This piece comes as a professionally printed and bound score and includes individual parts in PDF format for printing or for tablet viewing.
Once again, as with his piece “Lattes on the House,” Chris Roode has created an excellent composition for beginning percussion ensemble. Written for five or more players (all parts could easily be doubled or tripled as needed) and scored for a mixture of traditional percussion instruments along with a few found sounds, “Tom’s Tool Shed” is an engaging and pedagogical work. Rhythmically, Roode’s piece incorporates the basic eighth- and sixteenth-note figures with which beginning percussion students should be familiar. However, by scoring the work for percussion accessories and non- traditional instruments, the piece sounds far from “typical” and performers are exposed to a broader range of sound considerations, implements, etc., which is extremely valuable in their continued study of percussion.
Both in writing and timbre, the part for four concert toms comes across as the central voice in this piece, but each of the five parts has exposed opportunities. Roode utilizes a few call-and-response passages, a short canon to layer the first statement from each instrument, and several impactful unison figures through-out the piece to vary the rhythmic texture without any single part resting for an extended period. “Tom’s Tool Shed” is set in common time with a couple of tempo changes, each appearing after a fermata. The program notes are well writ-ten to address setup and performance logistics that would make this piece easy to program and teach, even for non- percussionist band directors. It should certainly be included on any short list of excellent first percussion ensembles for middle-school percussion students.
–Josh Gottry
Percussive Notes
Vol. 54, No. 2, May 2016
