Monsoon Season

Listen to the work here!
 
Monsoon Season is an exercise for drumline, designed to teach and build the performers’ confidence with the timing and execution of quintuplets. Unlike duple-based subdivisions such as eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and thirty-second notes (and so on), and triple-based subdivisions such as triplets and sextuplets (and to a lesser extent “9-lets”), quintuplets are not often regularly taught in academic music programs or private musical instruction. However, given the uniquely rhythmic nature of percussion instruments and percussion composition, in addition to the very unique rhythmic language of marching percussion music, I feel that it is important to build confidence with the notion of quintuplets, not just as a density of subdivisions that falls in between sixteenth notes and sextuplets in terms of speed, but as a specific lattice of partials that can be isolated in a precise manner.
The exercise moves through various sections, and the exercise as a whole explores isolating specific quintuplet partials, and displacing motivic ideas such that they may start on different partials. This in particular is something that usually comes very naturally in a duple-based rhythmic grid, and doing so with quintuplets will allow for a strong foundation for dealing with these rhythms in marching band and indoor drumline music. The displacement element of the exercise, as well as several other figures, are also influenced by my study of South Indian Carnatic music, specifically the rhythms of Carnatic music, at the University of North Texas with Poovalur Sriji. This is the second drumline exercise of mine, and both are named after weather patterns that I was dealing with while writing them.