The Percussion · Partituralis

Two great divisions, by pitch. The percussion section splits, as it has always split, into the pitched and unpitched — those that can play a tune, and those that cannot. The timpani, the xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, and celesta are pitched; the snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, gong, triangle, tambourine, and the long catalogue of effects are not. The two halves of the section have almost nothing in common save that they are struck.

The pitched percussion

The timpani — copper kettles tuned by pedal — are the oldest and most honoured of the pitched percussion. They have sat in the orchestra since the Baroque and remain its only fully idiomatic drum. Beside them: the glockenspiel, with its bright steel bars; the xylophone, with its dry, rattle-like wooden bars; the marimba, larger and warmer, a twentieth-century arrival; the vibraphone, with its rotating discs and pedal-sustained tone. The celesta, a small keyboard struck-bell instrument, completes the family.

The unpitched percussion

Membrane, metal, and wood. The snare drum for incisive rhythm, the bass drum for weight, the cymbals — suspended or crashed — for accent and shimmer. The triangle and tambourine for colour. The tam-tam (gong) for depth. Beyond these, an open list: temple blocks, woodblocks, castanets, claves, anvil, sleigh bells, sirens, the wind machine, the thunder sheet, the cannon. The unpitched percussion are an ever-expanding catalogue, and a composer of the present writes for whatever the imagination requires.

The section as recent invention

Until the late nineteenth century the percussion of the orchestra was, almost entirely, a pair of timpani. The mallet keyboards, the celesta, the marimba — all were grafted in over the past hundred and fifty years. The percussion section as we know it is the most modern of the four, and the one in which the most invention is still possible.

The percussion section is sized by the number of players, not by the number of instruments. A single player covers many instruments through the course of a movement; a single instrument may be played by two, three, or four players in turn. Composers write for so many players, and trust the principal percussionist to assign the parts.

Players, by orchestra size

Classical — 1 timpanist, no other percussion. Mozart and Haydn require, at most, a pair of kettledrums; nothing else.
Romantic — 1 timpanist + 1 to 2 percussionists. Bass drum, cymbals, triangle, occasional snare drum and glockenspiel. The standard for Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Wagner.
Late Romantic / early modern — 1 timpanist + 3 to 4 percussionists. Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky. Multiple drums, mallet keyboards, tam-tam, celesta, occasional offstage instruments.
Modern (full) — 1 timpanist + 4 to 6 percussionists. The standard of the contemporary symphony orchestra. Marimba, vibraphone, full mallet array, an unbounded effects catalogue.
Specialist works — beyond this, the section becomes whatever the score demands. Varèse’s Ionisation uses thirteen players; Messiaen’s Turangalîla, ten; Boulez’s Rituel, eight in two choirs.

The timpanist

The timpani are a separate department. The timpanist is, by long tradition, distinct from the rest of the percussion section: a principal in his own right, with a single instrument family, and treated by the conductor as a soloist. He sits at the back of the orchestra, often raised, behind or beside the brass.

On the stage

The rest of the percussion section sits along the back wall of the platform, often in a row that stretches across the stage. The instruments are large and many; they require space, sightlines to the conductor, and clear paths between them, since a single player may move between three or four instruments in a single page. The celesta and pitched mallet instruments are usually placed at the side, near the harps and first violins, where their soft tone can carry to the audience.

Two practical realities

First: instruments must be moved between, and a player cannot cross the stage in a beat. Allow for changes; mark them clearly. Second: many percussion instruments are loud at any dynamic. The triangle at piano cuts through a full orchestra, as does the snare drum, as does the high glockenspiel. Write percussion sparingly, and the section will speak. Write it continuously, and the orchestra will be drowned.

Adler is direct: the most common fault in percussion writing is thoughtless persistence. A cymbal crash on every downbeat, a triangle ring through the whole movement, a snare-drum roll that does not stop — each will register the first time, become irritating by the third, and inaudible by the tenth. Percussion is the section of restraint.

Score for the player, not for the instrument

Begin a score by listing the instruments required and assigning them to players. A passage that asks one player to play snare drum, suspended cymbal, and triangle simultaneously is not a passage that can be played. List the instruments in score order, name the players (Percussion 1, Percussion 2, &c.), and ensure that each line is humanly playable.

The timpani

The timpani are tuned, and the tuning takes time. A pedal change on a modern instrument can be made in a beat or two, but a change across all four drums (the standard set) is a slow operation — give at least four seconds, more if the music is loud. Rolls are the timpani’s natural sustain; single strokes are its punctuation. Notate the dampening (left-hand-on-head, written secco) when the music requires a clean stop; without it the head rings.

The classical timpanist had two drums tuned a fourth or fifth apart (tonic and dominant). The romantic timpanist had three; the modern, four or five. The pedal mechanism, perfected by Dresden makers in the late nineteenth century, made glissando and rapid retuning possible — a gift to Bartók and after.

Mallet selection

Every struck instrument is voiced by the mallet that strikes it. Hard sticks on a snare drum produce a sharp, clattering tone; brushes produce a hush; rute or birch rods produce something between. On the timpani, hard mallets are bright and articulated, soft mallets are warm and round. Specify when the choice matters —bacchette dure, bacchette di feltro morbide, con spazzole — and trust the player otherwise.

The roll, the rim, the dampened tone

Every percussion instrument has its sustain (the roll), its accent, and its dampened sound. Cymbals can be crashed or rolled with mallets; the snare drum can be played open or with the snare-off (senza corde) for a tom-like tone; the suspended cymbal rolled with timpani sticks gives the long, hissing crescendo of late Romantic climaxes. Each is a distinct effect. Specify which.

Pitched percussion as voice

The marimba and vibraphone are real melodic instruments — capable of long, lyrical lines — and the modern orchestra has them. Use them as it would use a clarinet or a horn, with a sense of phrase. The xylophone is more limited: dry, percussive, suited to articulated rhythm rather than song. The glockenspiel is for short, brilliant punctuations. The celesta is for fairy-tale delicacy and very little else; Tchaikovsky discovered it, and composers have been obeying him ever since.

Notation

Pitched percussion is notated on a single staff, in treble or bass clef as the range demands. Unpitched percussion is notated on a single line (one instrument per staff) or on a five-line staff with each instrument on a fixed line, by convention. List the instruments at the top of each system, or at first entry. Do not assume the player will guess.

Some closing rules of thumb

The cymbal crash, used twice a movement, is grand. Used twenty times, it is wallpaper.
A single triangle stroke at pp in a string tutti is one of the most magical sounds in the orchestra. Used.
The bass drum at fortissimo can be heard at the back of any concert hall. The bass drum at pianissimo is felt rather than heard, and is more frightening for it.
Rolls on instruments without natural sustain (xylophone, glockenspiel) require two mallets and a fast hand; they are possible, but tiring.
When a passage asks one player to do too much in too little time, the conductor or the principal will quietly redistribute it. Save them the trouble: assign the parts yourself.

For most of the orchestra’s history the percussion section was a timpanist and nothing else. The expansion of the section is a story almost entirely of the past two centuries, and largely of the twentieth.

The Baroque kettledrum

The timpani entered the orchestra from the cavalry, where they were paired with the trumpet for ceremonial and military use. By Bach and Handel they were a fixed festal element — present wherever trumpets were present, and tuned, almost without exception, to tonic and dominant.

Janissary percussion

In the late eighteenth century European composers became fascinated by the percussion of the Ottoman Janissary bands — bass drum, cymbals, triangle. Mozart’s Entführung is the most familiar use; Haydn’s Military Symphony adopts the same ensemble for symphonic purposes. The bass drum, cymbals, and triangle entered the orchestra as a borrowed exoticism and stayed.

Beethoven and Berlioz

Beethoven uses Janissary percussion at the climax of his Ninth Symphony’s finale; Berlioz, in the Symphonie fantastique and the Requiem, requires four sets of timpani, multiple bass drums, and a full effects-catalogue including bells. Berlioz is the first composer to treat the percussion section as a body, and the Treatise on Instrumentation remains the moment at which it became a subject.

The mallet revolution

The xylophone entered the orchestra with Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874); the celesta with Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (1892); the marimba and vibraphone in the early twentieth century. By the 1930s the pitched percussion was a family in itself, and a composer could write for a mallet keyboard chorus as freely as for a wind chorale.

The twentieth-century explosion

Stravinsky’s Rite, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Varèse’s Ionisation (the first major work for percussion alone), Messiaen’s Turangalîla — each enlarged the orchestra’s percussion section, until by the 1950s a new piece might require fifty instruments and six players. The catalogue continues to grow. The percussion section is the only one in the orchestra that is still, in any meaningful sense, being invented.