When Robert van Sice first began teaching percussion, he, like many young teachers, worked primarily from a one-size-fits-all methodology.
“You know, ‘I believe this about percussion playing, and if you’ll just do it like this, it works,’” he said. “Formulas.”
But now, 40 years later — 28 of them at Yale School of Music (YSM), where he directs percussion studies as well as the Yale Percussion Group (YPG) — van Sice has long since concluded that teaching is more of a “bespoke art.” Every student has certain gaps that must be filled, and they are best filled in customized ways.
“My job is to find where those voids are,” he said, “and then figure out how best to help them. Humor works with some people, rigidity works better with others. I’m a different person with each of my students.”
There is perhaps no better showcase of van Sice’s instructional prowess than the Yale Percussion Group, an unconducted ensemble that he founded when he started at Yale. The ensemble of six YSM students performs in the style of a chamber music group (think string quartet), and plays compositions written exclusively for percussion.
Several of van Sice’s protégés have gone on to start their own acclaimed ensembles, including the Grammy-nominated groups Sandbox Percussion and Sō Percussion.
Prior to the mid-20th century, percussionists were treated as the musical flourishes at the back of a symphony that added the equivalent of the “sprinkles atop the cake,” van Sice said. But gradually, composers began to write works that placed percussion at the core of the music making. (Van Sice, as one of the world’s foremost performers of contemporary music for marimba, has premiered more than 100 of those scores himself.)
My job is to find where students’ voids are, in either their technical craft or their humanity, and then figure out how best to help them.
Marimbas, vibraphones, drums, cymbals, triangle — any combination of these instruments and many others may turn up in any one of the YPG’s performances. Their execution is both musically and physically dynamic, with mallets flying across keyboards, sticks striking, and the occasional kick of a foot to the beat.
Percussionists are “the mad inventors of music making,” said Matt Boyle, one of the group’s current members. “We get to explore all of these sound and color possibilities, and these timbres that are so imaginative.”
The ensemble’s percussionists are at the top of their game musically. Van Sice helps them develop the skills of empathy, mind reading, and compromise necessary to work together precisely and seamlessly as an ensemble.
He commonly uses two analogies to express the level of collaboration he’s looking for, said Chad Beebe, another ensemble member.
“He says it’s like being in a submarine with five other people — we’re comrades in arms trying to tackle any situation that arises,” Beebe said. “And then there is the idea of, it takes a village. ‘Breathing together’ is a phrase he uses often. Ultimately, it’s about becoming a community, a community that strives to push our art form to its maximum.”
That requires countless hours of practice at the Adams Center for Musical Arts, but the students happily squeeze in those hours between their many other YSM obligations, even if it means meeting in the wee hours of the morning, Boyle said.
“Everyone’s always looking forward to getting together,” he said. “There’s just this connection that everyone begins to create musically, and interpersonally as well, where you can just start to read each other’s minds. It’s hard to put into words — it’s really more of a sensation, a feeling.”
For ensemble member Jessie Chiang, making music with the ensemble “is a more powerful thing than playing solo. Sometimes it’s very challenging. But most of the time I find it purely joyful.”
Several of the current ensemble members, including Beebe, followed van Sice to YSM after having previously studied with him at the Peabody Institute, a conservatory at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was on the faculty until recently.
Van Sice is also the artistic director of The Percussion Collective, a professional ensemble made up of his former students.
In just his lifetime, said van Sice, percussion as an art form has developed quickly — Chiang, for example, is able to play marimba at a level van Sice says he could have only dreamed of at that age. And each iteration of the YPG — which graduates two members each year and welcomes two new ones each fall — seeks to push the art form to a new level.
“That’s really part of the fun of evolution — seeing the art of percussion playing grow at such a rapid level,” van Sice said. “I’m thrilled by it. And I’m dying to see where percussionists are at 30 years from now.”
