Snowstorm

Listen to the work here!
 
Snowstorm is an exercise for drumline, named after the circumstances of living under which came its creation. In the winter season of 2021, I was living in Denton, Texas, when the entire state of Texas lost power, thanks to the extreme cold temperatures and lack of centralized power grid. Amidst the week break from academic responsibilities (and the week of virtually no ability to reliably practice any percussion instruments which I did not have access to in my dormitory building), I found myself practicing a lot of snare drum fundamentals and rudiments using my practice pad. Out of a warm up exercise for myself which combined some of these rudimental exercises into a sequence came this exercise.
 
This exercise takes the form of a spree, where individual rudiments are explored, alternating with a common refrain, in this case the measure of flam accents (in the Snare and Tenor drums) which opens the music. In addition to flam accents, this exercise includes flam drags, “cheeses” (a flam accent with a double stroke on the same stroke which has the grace note), flam taps, inverted flam taps, paradiddles, five stroke rolls, rhythmic displacement of short motivic cells, changing subdivisions, and “hertas” (the realization of a 3:2 polyrhythm between hands with a flam at the convergence of the two rhythms), creating a useful triplet-based exercise for drumline.