Variations on a Brake Drum

On the stage were six nimble young men in dinner jackets, and strewed around them were more than a hundred percussion instruments--including a horse's jawbone, six water-buffalo bells, eight auto brake drums, a corrugated washboard and a set of bongo drums. When the conductor raised his baton, the young men moved on an assortment of weapons and started to flail away. The effect was like an explosion in a boiler factory. The occasion: an all-percussion concert at New York's Manhattan School of Music, under the direction of Veteran Percussionist Paul Price.

For the concert Conductor Price had lined up a sampling from the growing literature for percussion ensembles. Included were Malloy Miller's Prelude for Percussion, Lou Harrison's Canticle No. j, Arthur Cohn's Quotations in Percussion, Michael Colgrass' Three Brothers. The most interesting was the Harrison piece, which laid down a hauntingly languorous theme on the ocarina, then echoed itself in a series of guitar, xylophone and muted cowbell flights as vaporous and softly glowing as a Japanese watercolor. Cohn's Quotations, on the other hand, utilized 103 instruments (including the exposed strings of a grand piano, which one player walloped with a lamb's-wool-covered drumstick) to achieve frequent climaxes of crashing, ear-numbing virtuosity. But the composition's most effective moments were also the most subdued: a passage in which drums rolled with the distant tremble of thunder while the pod rattle and wood blocks chattered with the strident noises of night.

Conductor Price, 38, a percussionist throughout his career (he now teaches at the Manhattan School of Music), expects performances of the sort he put on last week to become a concert hall commonplace. Most composers, he points out, now write their percussion parts explicitly into the score, something they almost never did before the premiere of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat in 1918, and orchestras have beefed up their percussion sections to four or five men. To mount last week's concert, Price had to rent some of his gaudier noisemakers, but one favorite set of instruments he already had on hand: the eight Ford and Chevrolet brake drums that he picked up two years ago in an automobile junk yard. Still missing from the ensemble's instrument list: the jawbone of an ass.

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