During the summer months Faith Lutheran Church reduces from three Sunday morning services down to two. Also, because the Spirit of Faith choir takes a break during this time, there are many opportunities for instrumentalists and vocalists to lend their talents to the worship service. I decided last month to fill one of the slots with my friend Andy and play some marimba+english horn and marimba+oboe duets.

Many marimbists are probably familiar with Leigh Howard Stevens‘ transcriptions of Tchaikovsky‘s “Album for the Young” for solo marimba. Instead of playing this as a marimba solo, we divided the part and made a duet. You can listen to the “Waltz” here.

For the marimba+english horn part, we decided to try one of the Bach two part inventions. Our intentions were good, but we will wait until round two before posting that duet. 🙂

My friend Andy’s blog post has more on the event if you are interested.

The Samobor Music Festival will be held September 27th-30th in Samobor Croatia. This year as part of the festival there will be a marimba week featuring Ivana Bilic and Emmanuel Sejourne. The seminar is for “performers and teachers of all ages and nationalities”. You have the ability to register as an active or passive attendant depending on if you would like to perform in the masterclasses.

I had the opportunity to meet Ivana Bilic at the Zeltsman Marimba Festival this summer. Her performance of Steve Mackey’s “The Beast” was stunning and I hope continues to be part of her repertoire. Emmanuel Sejourne is the composer of “Katamiya” which was the recent piece that was learned for the Steve Weiss interactive music contest, as well as one of my favorite marimba pieces of all time “Nancy”.

Plan a trip to Croatia and join these two world class marimbists! For more information, visit their website.

Ms. Ji Hye Jung is organizing a consortium to commission composer John Serry to compose a new marimba solo. This solo will be approximately 10 minutes in length and will be of “medium” difficulty. John Serry is famous for many compositions but his marimba compositions include “Night Rhapsody” and “West Side Suite”.

If you are interested in participating in this consortium financially, you may contact me directly and I can put you in contact with Ms. Jung. My email address is marimba (at) jeffsass.com.

Ms. Jung has a performance of “Night Rhapsody” available on YouTube below.

As noted in my first post about Percussion Axiom TV #29 we are working on the Gordon Stout Etude #3 measures 15-37. As I worked a few more hours with this middle section I noticed I was playing a few wrong notes by expecting the end of measure 18, 21, 23 and 25 to end on the same octave D. But each measure is different so play attention when playing this part.

I also noticed when I watched the recording of myself that even after my pause around measure 33, I still wasn’t playing the correct notes. I have to remember that while practicing, it is more important to watch the music and learn the notes correctly than trying to play through it at a faster tempo.

My playing is posted below to see a mostly right performance of the longer middle section of the piece. I am excited that there are only about 8 measures of new material left.  Then I will have to really start working on my evil plot to ensure the next marimba piece we learn together is tonal. 🙂 Yes, Dr. Burritt I am talking to you!

Enjoy my “take 6” of the Etude.

Coming to a PBS station near you later this year, is Conspirare’s Company of Voices concert. This is certainly one not to miss! Conspirare is a nationally recognized and Grammy nominated chorus that resides in Texas. What is interesting about this concert, is that many of the pieces are paired with percussion ensemble. Yes, percussion ensemble and choir.

That is pretty exciting by itself, but even more exciting is the amount of mallet instruments that are used. From the looks of things at least 2 marimbas, 2 vibraphones, and a glockenspiel were used. I also saw drumset, crotales, steel drums, triangle and other auxilliary percussion instruments.

And if that wasn’t exciting enough, the director of the percussion ensemble, Thomas Burritt joins in on the playing and also did the orchestrations for one of the pieces.

But wait, there is even more excitement! Craig Hella Johnson is a native of Minnesota, where I currently live, and went to St. Olfa College. He was quoted in one of the interviews as saying “I went to St. Olaf which was a big choral school, …, I saw the Minnesota Orchestra and I was blown away”. Oh and BTW went to University of Illinois and Julliard and Yale and Germany, etc.

To listen to Tryptych online before the PBS special, head over here, or watch the embedded video as part of this post.

“Trptych” by Conspirare from KLRU / Conspirare on Vimeo.

Thomas Burritt has a wonderful web site that includes a weekly podcast called Percussion Axiom. Each week he discusses an aspect of the percussion happenings and many of them are focused on the marimba.

I first saw Tom at PASIC (Percussive Arts Society International Convention) in 2000 where he participated in the New Music Day for Marimba. A copy of that program is available as a PDF. Since this was my first PASIC I didn’t introduce myself to too many people as I was still in awe at the sheer talent and magnitude of the percussion event. I will post more about PASIC in a future entry.

One of the very cool things in a recent episode of Percussion Axiom TV, was Tom’s suggestion to learn a marimba piece together as an online community. When I heard about this I was thrilled and scared! I wasn’t a music major in college (most of my friend’s were) so I didn’t spent 6 hours in the practice room. However, I do own a 5-octave MarimbaOne and I am as highly motivated as someone can be about a percussion instrument!

There was an online vote as to which piece to play and we started 2 weeks ago. As I started working on the piece, I noticed that I had more to say than what could be said in a comment on Tom’s web site or via Twitter, so I decided it was time to make a marimba blog.

I bought www.jeffsass.com years ago because it was available so now is a great time to use it. So here we are! I am a marimbist with a blog and I am going to use it to better the percussion community and help foster a discussion about not only the piece we are learning together but any marimba topic in general.

Hi everyone – welcome to my marimba blog. The purpose of this blog is to talk about anything related to the marimba and the never ending pursuit of creating fantastic musical experiences on a non-standard instrument.

For my initial post instead of a long-winded introduction and background of who I am and why I am doing this I am instead going to jump right in to the matter at hand. So join the conversation and head over to my second post.