What I Sent My Nephew

My nephew is starting percussion, so I sent him a picture of my desk.

A practice pad, and a fistful of mallets standing up in a holder next to it — yarn, felt, rubber, hard plastic, a couple of pairs of sticks. Also, visible in the frame and not intentionally: a ball of blue yarn, an apple, and a TV remote.

What I wanted him to notice is that percussion is the only instrument family where the first thing you accumulate is implements. A trumpet player buys a trumpet. We buy a widening vocabulary of things to hit stuff with, and the sound lives at least as much in the mallet as in the instrument. Same bar on the same marimba, four different mallets, four different pieces of music.

That’s the fun part and it’s the part every twelve-year-old immediately gets.

The part they don’t is that the most important object in the photo is the eight inches of rubber none of the mallets will ever touch. The pad does not sound good. It is not supposed to. It exists so you can find out what your hands are actually doing without a nice instrument covering for you.

I did not put that in the message. He’s twelve. He’ll work it out.