Everybody Needs A Team

Two guest artists at UT this week: Dieter Hennings, who teaches guitar at Kentucky, and Paul Vaillancourt, who teaches percussion at Columbus State down in Georgia.

Somewhere in the middle of it Dieter told the students that everybody needs a team.

It’s the kind of line that can land as networking advice, which is not what he meant and not how the room took it. And the reason it didn’t land that way is that the room itself was the argument.

Paul studied with Raymond DesRoches. Charles Wuorinen wrote Janissary Music for DesRoches and dedicated it to him, in 1966 — a piece that is now simply part of what a percussionist studies, sitting on the shelf next to everything else as though it had always been there.

It hadn’t. In 1966 it did not exist, and the reason it exists is that a composer had a specific person in mind whose playing he trusted enough to write something difficult for.

So my students spent an afternoon two steps from that. Not from a recording of it. From the actual chain.

I’ve made this argument here before in a more abstract way — that percussion is the only section that had to argue its way into the room, that we have no inherited performance tradition and therefore build one piece at a time. What I don’t say often enough is the mechanism. It isn’t talent and it isn’t hustle.

It’s that somebody knew somebody. A composer trusted a player. A player pushed a composer. Somebody made a phone call to a person whose work they wanted to be near, and forty years later it’s repertoire.

Everything I’ve built started with a phone call like that, and I got the good end of it more often than I deserved.

Dieter’s also at my alma mater, which I enjoyed more than I let on.