Legacy of Timpani and Percussion

German-born Schwar received instruction on the violin before making the switch to percussion. As a young man, he played in a German military band before moving to Russia, where he played under the direction of the celebrated composer Nikolai Rimsky- Korsakov. Fritz Scheel, music director of the newly formed Philadelphia Orchestra, recruited Schwar to join the orchestra beginning in its 1903–04 season. Schwar would remain with the orchestra for more than four decades. He joined Curtis’s faculty teaching timpani and percussion at the school’s founding, instructing a generation of students until the temporary closure of the orchestra department in 1942. One of Schwar’s mentees, longtime New York Philharmonic percussionist Saul Goodman, remarked, “Schwar had the most beautiful tone of any timpanist I have ever heard. With the encouragement and cooperation of Leopold Stokowski, he achieved tone colors from the timpani never heard before.”

Beginning in the 1950s, the timpani and percussion program enjoyed a period of consistency under Fred Hinger, who served on the faculty for fifteen years, and Gerald Carlyss, who taught timpani and percussion for almost two decades. Hinger encouraged his students to participate in a variety of ensembles, advice at least one of his pupils appears to have taken to heart. Russell Hartenberger (’66) has spent decades performing with myriad soloists and ensembles including Yo-Yo Ma, the Canadian Brass, Pierre Boulez, and Steve Reich and Musicians, experiences which served as foundations for his work as editor of The Cambridge Companion to Percussion and author of Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich.

In addition to his pedagogy, Hinger’s legacy surely rests on his innovative work in instrument design. While at Curtis, Hinger founded the Hinger Touch-Tone Corporation. Among Hinger’s many design innovations and instrument improvements were sliding weights on timpani and snare drumsticks, a rotating timpani bowl, a special drumhead with an extra layer of Mylar at the edges, and the patented Space- Tone snare drum. This inventive spirit persists among the percussion faculty to this day: to cite just one example, Robert van Sice, in collaboration with the Adams Corporation, recently designed a five-octave marimba which bears his name.

Unlike most orchestral musicians, who are called upon to play only one instrument (or at most, a few), percussionists must master an immense variety of instruments of all shapes, sizes, materials, and timbres (indeed, as the Philadelphia Inquirer noted in a 1923 concert review, “Oscar Schwar’s solo is distinguished by the longest title ever seen on orchestra programs: ‘Concerto Grosso for Timpani, snare drums, big drum, small drum, triangle, tam-tam, Glockenspiel, Xylophone, Tambourine, Bells, Castanets, Turkish Cymbols [sic], Chinese Cymbols [sic], German Pauken, and Orchestra.’”). Curtis percussion faculty are globally renowned for their expertise with particular instruments and styles. Michael “Mickey” Bookspan, who taught at Curtis and played in the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly 50 years, was lauded for his snare and cymbal playing. One of his early students at Curtis, Carol Stumpf (’82), recalled, “I can’t imagine anyone else making so much music from one cymbal note.”

The current generation of Curtis timpani and percussion students are well prepared to master these myriad instruments thanks to the diverse expertise of the current faculty. In the new millennium, the Curtis timpani and percussion department has expanded to offer its students a wealth of knowledge from the broad world of global percussion. Alan Abel, a renowned teacher and long-time member of the Philadelphia Orchestra whose triangle and timpani designs populate orchestras worldwide, taught orchestral percussion, while alumni Scott Robinson (’91) and Joseph Nero (’74) have instructed students on drum set. Don Liuzzi, current principal timpani of the Philadelphia Orchestra, provides in-depth knowledge of that instrument as a frequent performer and through his work designing timpani with Yamaha. Since his appointment in 2008, Robert van Sice has brought his unparalleled expertise as one of the world’s foremost performers of contemporary music for marimba. Van Sice has premiered more than one hundred works for the instrument, including James Wood’s Spirit Festival with Lamentations (1995), which introduced the then-newly developed quarter-tone marimba. Rolando Morales-Matos, now celebrating his twentieth year at Curtis, brings a diverse range of experiences to his pedagogy. A prolific performer, composer, and textbook author on the subject of Latin jazz, Morales-Matos spent more than two decades in the orchestra pit of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Lion King. Eric Millstein, the most recent addition to the Curtis percussion faculty, brings to his teaching experience performing both the symphonic and operatic repertoires.

When Curtis opened in 1924, Oscar Schwar’s studio comprised just one student. While the timpani and percussion studio remains small to provide ample instruction and performance opportunities to each student, the studio has grown to its current roster of four students. The number of percussion faculty has similarly expanded to ensure that students receive in-depth training in a variety of instruments and styles to meet the wide-ranging demands of the percussion landscape.