A Speaking Percussion Method Book: Practice, Pedagogy, and Performance

Abstract

This dissertation is the first ever comprehensive method book for the practice and performance of solo speaking percussion music. Speaking percussion is an interconnected mode of performance that weaves together vocalization and percussive sound-making, each amplifying and extending one another. As a composite art form, speaking percussion interrelates seemingly disparate parts into a generative space for performance activity while expanding upon elements that are already present within a percussionist's practice: movement, gesture, expression, choreography, and body awareness. Speaking percussion offers a space to cultivate a practice of choice-making, introspection, storytelling, and self-expression. This performance space circulates and interconnects experiential knowledge, emotion, place, culture, narrative, story, politics, and identity. Within the interpretation of speaking percussion scores, performers may be asked to center their identities, stories, and experiences, while considering those that belong to others. Alongside contextualizing articles from a fictional newspaper called "The Athena Daily," the four chapters in this dissertation offer exercises centered on steady pulse and speaking, etudes, an introduction to the voice, exercises in vocalization, invitations to movement and body awareness, resources of support, and self-led activities. This work converses with fields of percussion studies, voice studies, theater studies, dis/ability studies, ethno/musicology, performance studies, American Indian and Indigenous studies, cultural and ethnic studies, music pedagogy, and first-person narrative-inquiry. Speaking percussion repertoire is situated within a historically Eurocentric discipline. This dissertation invites artists of all backgrounds and identities to this new curriculum, offering a warm, inclusive, and accessible space of learning that reaches toward dis/abled, femme, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ communities.