Sweet Tooth

This is a fun, 4-minute duet that explores several timbral palettes that can be achieved with a stick, a brush, and a coated snare drum head. This music gives players the opportunity to perform brush sweeps and strikes, along with stick buzz strokes, rimshots, and playing on the rim. Additionally, performers will increase their ability to perform duple-based rhythms, patterns, and figures in conjunction with another player, even as a possible first step into the world of chamber-music performance.

While this music contains rhythmic patterns and grooves that repeat and punctuate phrases, this piece has the character of being through composed, as the nature and overall feel of the music remains the same from beginning to end. Set at a comfortable quarter note = 80, each player carries equal musical weight, as both parts are composed of sixteenth-note and eighth-note based figures that overlap sounds and frequently culminate with unison rhythmic stops.

The appeal of the piece rests on the interesting cohesion of two differently pitched drums (snares off the entire time) that create a rhythmic bed of texture off of which to interject the occasional rimshot, brush accent, brush sweep, or rim click. Once each player gets comfortable with the basic compositional thrust of duple-based patterns, thirty-second-note gestures, and performing with one stick and one brush, the entire duet will come together pretty quickly.

—Joshua D. Smith
Percussive Notes
Vol. 61, No. 5, October 2023