Fireworks from the Battery

Chicago's Ravinia Park music festival looked like an Eastern bazaar. Strewn around the stage one evening last week were 47 pieces of Western and Ori ental hardware: four full-grown timpani, four little timpani, three barrel drums, nine objects that resembled brass flower pots (they were Buddhist prayer bells), an array of bamboo, glass and wooden utensils, and lots and lots of gongs.

The occasion was the world premiere of a 20-minute Concerto for Solo Percussion and Orchestra. If the event had a distinctly Japanese flavor, that was understandable. The star of the evening was Solo Percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta, 22, who took on all 47 instruments, and the conductor was Seiji Ozawa. Even Composer Heuwell Tircuit had an Oriental background; now a music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, he spent eight years as a percussionist with Japanese orchestras.

Dressed in a white tuxedo with black bellbottoms, Soloist Yamash'ta shuffled onto the stage, crouched behind his instruments while Ozawa unleashed a brass-heavy fanfare. After a menacing roll on the bass drum, Yamash'ta picked up speed and energy, began to ricochet from one instrument to another. Hair flopping, arms flying, he nudged, banged, tickled and teased the instruments. At one point he flailed away with both hands, simultaneously blowing onto bamboo sticks, kicking the prayer bells and rubbing his body frenziedly against the gongs. After it was all over, the audience gave him a standing ovation. "I don't know that I like the music," commented one dazzled member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, "but the choreography was great."

Though critics have always suspected that some conductors studied under ballet masters, Yamash'ta's debt to the dance world is legitimate. A musical prodigy who took up drumming at the age of twelve, he became timpanist with the Kyoto and Osaka orchestras two years later, studying ballet on the side. Soon after, Director Akira Kurosawa picked him to perform the score for the movie Yojimbo, and at 16 he made his first solo appearance, playing Milhaud's Percussion Concerto with the Osaka Philharmonic. He traveled to the U.S. in 1964 and won a scholarship to the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. Later on Yamash'ta founded his own jazz quintet in Boston.

From Kitchen to Dining Room. Yamash'ta is determined to transform "the kitchen" (musicians' derisive label for the percussion section) into a dining room. "If I play Beethoven's Fifth 500 times in my life as an orchestra percussionist, what have I achieved?" he says. Adds Composer Tircuit: "What can a percussionist possibly do with a bass drum that will be interesting for any length of time? We've got to try to find a way to write pieces that are musically meaningful."

Luckily for Yamash'ta and his fellow kitchen chefs, there is more creative music around for the forgotten men of the orchestra than ever before. Among composers of the past, Hector Berlioz was perhaps the first to pay much attention to the symphonic battery of drums. Later on, Stravinsky and Bartok proved that percussionists could do more interesting things than simply thump out a basic rhythm. Nowadays such avant-gardists as Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karl-heinz Stockhausen treat the percussionist as a performer with rights (and responsibilities) equal to any other soloist's.

"We live in a cacophonous age," says Saul Goodman, principal timpanist with the New York Philharmonic, another recognized master of the craft, "and people look for something more than Bach, Beethoven and Mahler. Percussion playing and writing seem to fill that desire."

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