Drums Instruments of Learning
Michael Wall’s Playful Percussion program teaches kids more than how to play drums. They also learn history, geography, even fractions — all while getting a real bang out of it
patterns, reducing stress and resulting in a “drumming high.”
Aaron Tod has the rhythm
For Wall, however, the emphasis is on drumming as a kind of social glue.
“Our culture would be well-served by an activity that brings us together as a community,” he says.
He believes that many of today’s societal ills such as drugs and alcohol and disenfranchised and radical youth could be avoided with community music making that brings families and communities together across the generations.
“We as a culture have lost our community level drum dances and song,” he says. “We are a culture in which song and dance and movement have become the realm of the experienced. The rest of us are conditioned to sit and watch and listen passively, and if we ever try, we feel deeply inadequate. When we go home at the end of the day, we courtyard ourselves into our houses and plug into our vast entertainment network and passively watch. In places like Brazil, they come home and get together and make music and sing and dance, because that is their entertainment.”
Wall’s teaching method is different but effective
Drum dancing and song bring people together, Wall says. It’s also a way of passing down teaching stories, with their community morals and values. And Wall has seen first-hand what that can do in the West African communities he has visited.
“Here are these people, they’re essentially undernourished, they don’t have the tip of the tip of the iceberg of what we’ve got,” he says. “But they’re happy.”
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