Rediscovering Marimba

There are three ways to hold four marimba mallets in your hands. Really, there are two ways, one of which has a slight variation. It comes down to whether you hold the outside mallets between your index and middle fingers, allowing them to cross in your palms,¹ or you hold them between your middle and ring fingers.²

Crossing provides stability. The mallets are firm in the grip. The player easily brings them both to bear on the marimba or vibraphone. Shift to the desired width and hammer away. It’s staccato. It’s sturdy. It’s jazz.

Foregoing the cross requires a mix of finesse and strength. The mallets flow and move and, yes, wobble while the player dances across the keyboard. Adjusting the interval in the hand is easy, sometimes too easy, and precision is not guaranteed. To the audience, they’ll see how the motion of the mallets sways, running like water, edging towards disaster until the player regains control of the woven heads that only wish to fling themselves onto the next bar and ring out that beautiful, warm rosewood resonance.

I seriously began playing four-mallet marimba during my junior year of high school. I worked through the first Funny Mallets book by Zivkovic, and by mid-year performed the marimba and vibraphone duet “Light as a Feather” with another top percussionist in my grade. He used one of the cross grips for the vibraphone part. It was an apt choice, as he ended up attending the esteemed University of North Texas to study jazz, and is now a performing and composing jazz drummer around the Twin Cities. I always felt more comfortable with the uncrossed grip.

Whether I requested the challenge, or my percussion instructor issued it, I was eager to tackle a larger piece for my senior year percussion ensemble concert. Each year in our percussion program, I had watched an accomplished senior tear through tremendous works. “Uneven Souls” by Zivkovic. “Concerto No. 2” by Rosauro. These are incredible, professional-level feats that took months to prepare.

A bit naïve, I wanted to do the same.³ My instructor suggested the impressive and seminal piece “Marimba Spiritual” by Minoru Miki.

I spent every available day before and after school grinding through the piece, learning it measure by measure, section by section. The school only had one marimba large enough to accommodate the piece,⁴ and I selfishly monopolized it.⁵ By late February, my instructor had a direct talk with me: would I be ready to perform it in a month? We hadn’t spent much dedicated time on the piece—our lesson setup was a bit flexible for financial reasons—and he wanted an honest assessment. I committed. We selected the two other seniors who would join our instructor to play the ensemble, and started assembling all the sections.

The first half of the piece is a slow, beautiful, dolorous solo with difficult harmonies and strange rhythms. Both for the sake of my focus and the audience, we cut out the middle of that opening.⁶ We were all eager to get to the second half of the piece.

It is blistering. Raucous. Frenetic. It has an undercurrent of celebration. Written to evoke the end of intense drought, the listener can imagine rain pelting across hard, arid ground as rivulets form and slowly find their way to nurture the land. That pat, pat, pat of thick raindrops is paired with joyous feet dancing and running, kids filled with wonder and adults reveling in a renewed hope for the future. I couldn’t fully appreciate these elements in a piece that was at the bleeding edge of my technical abilities, not like those who can perform this piece with subtlety and spirit. But I know the song intimately and can appreciate that connection now. I can hear it. I can feel it.

Once I was past the determined frustration of piecing the parts together, it was tremendously fun to play. Performing “Marimba Spiritual” was my proudest moment in school; and while I’m glad that my dad managed to film some of it, I always feel a twinge of sadness that there’s no recording of the entire piece.⁷

No matter. I have the core memory, the benefit of focused perseverance, and callouses between my middle and ring fingers.

My percussion skills peaked at that senior year concert. Between “Marimba Spiritual” and the similarly fun first movement of “Trio Per Uno” by Zivkovic, I learned what dedicated daily work can achieve. And in each subsequent concert band I’ve joined as an adult, I’ve coasted on those youthful percussion skills. My brain knows what it needs to do, and I rarely come across a piece in concert band where my body can’t follow those instructions. The percussion parts in band aren’t often technically challenging. At least, not on the scale of dedicated percussion ensemble music.

The instrumentation is also entirely different. Percussion ensemble music gets weird. Erin once rubbed a rubber ball across a concert bass drum. I’ve watched pieces involving a metronome on top of a snare drum, and assorted broken glassware. While there are a few band composers who get percussion, that’s not the music most community bands are likely to play. There are drums and cymbals, a tambourine, a triangle, the odd bells and whistles (literally).

Even if an ambitious music director wanted to perform such music, do they have the personnel? My community band in Naugatuck has me, and occasionally Erin. We cover what’s important and leave the rest alone.

Even if the ambitious music director corralled the personnel, do they have the instruments? Percussion equipment is expensive. Last month, a viola player, who should’ve known better what with his costly piece of wood, was helping me move some timpani up a staircase in a church. He commented on not wanting to cause any damage, lest we have to replace many hundreds of dollars worth of these drums. A single timpani is, in fact, several thousand dollars.

Marimbas are much the same. They’re the gem of any collection of mallet percussion. Small synthetic options will start around three thousand dollars, while a rosewood five-octave marimba will rapidly approach twenty-thousand. They’re not often needed in band or symphonic music, so schools will prioritize the cheaper (and sturdier) xylophones and vibraphones.⁸ I grew up in an affluent school district and had the privilege of playing marimba in middle school—nothing like where I would peak in high school, but it was a start. However, the other middle schools I’ve visited for band rehearsals in San Diego and Naugatuck are not so well-endowed. No ambitious music director could offer me the chance to rekindle my love affair with the marimba.

I had not played four-mallet marimba in years. I had not played any marimba in these concert bands, or even seen a marimba in a decade until a couple of months ago.

A flautist in the first community band I found in Connecticut suggested that I join the Plainville Wind Ensemble. She told me how their upcoming repertoire was intense, and their healthy percussion section with its six members could use even more hands. I immediately sent over my information with a quick list of bona fides. As it happens, their upright bassist⁹, who is also their membership director, had played in University Band at Minnesota with me. They let me in.

Plainville’s music director is ambitious. He has high standards. He already had six percussionists and was adding a seventh. Plus, Plainville practices at the high school with a full complement of mallet instruments. Sure, the marimba is only 4.6 octaves, but it was there. Even better, once I made it clear my predilection and preference for mallet parts, I was given a few spare marimba parts.

I was electrified. All my memories came roaring back, and I couldn’t believe I had ever settled for playing guitar alone as my main source of musical comfort.

Then, an omen. In the next two weeks, four of my old mallets happened to basically disintegrate: the grips I’d put on them had worn off, the glue that attaches the head to the shaft had lost its adhesion. So, I allowed myself the treat of ordering a new set of mallets with an adult’s salary, rather than the pittance of basically minimum wage at Target.

Once they arrived, I pulled out old PDFs of music I had stashed away. I sat on a yoga mat on the floor of my office and visualized a marimba, pounding the mat with four mallets placed comfortably in my hands, while I went through the motions of playing some songs from my earliest practice books. I drove to band early the next week, intent on seeing if I still had it.

Sort of.

I impressed myself with how natural it felt to stand in front of a marimba again. The confidence of maturity was proving an adequate substitute for the naivety of youth. It was clunky here and there. My core abilities remained, though the fine motor skills that let me deftly navigate the keyboard with precision had atrophied. They require consistent practice to refine, something I can’t yet afford without shelling out thousands of dollars for a marimba.

Still, all my passion has resurfaced. While I haven’t spent every day on the floor of my office pretending to play, I think about it often. I’m committed to sticking with this excellent ensemble, finding ways to once again strengthen my percussion skills, and, one day, buy a marimba. I’ve subsisted on piano and guitar for years, suited as they are to small living spaces and crowd-pleasing music. But I have my sights on the centerpiece of my own instrument collection.

Besides, everyone has a piano.