Principal Percussionist Marc Damoulakis talks about feeling the rhythm from an early age and what it means to keep time for The Cleveland Orchestra.
Principal Percussionist Marc Damoulakis talks about feeling the rhythm from an early age and what it means to keep time for The Cleveland Orchestra.
Featured Music
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Scheherazade
4. Festival at Baghdad; the Sea; the Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior
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Welcome to The Cleveland Orchestra’s On a Personal Note, where we explore the many ways music shapes our lives. In difficult situations or moments of sheer joy, music connects us with our humanity.
My name’s Marc Damoulakis. I’m the principal percussionist of The Cleveland Orchestra, and I’ve chosen to share Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade.
As a percussionist, there are pieces that ask you to make music out of one or two notes or one or two notes or three notes on a flower pot, for instance. It could be something like that, or it could be one low gong note that has to have meaning, that has to represent something, or a beautiful melody on a mallet instrument.
I’m not sure anybody starts training in third, fourth, or fifth grade with a goal of being principal percussionist of a major orchestra, but I always enjoyed the drums. Both my parents are musicians. My father was a band director until I was about four or five years old, and my mother taught piano and general music.
In fifth grade, I chose an instrument in school, and I didn’t want to choose what my parents did at the time. For better or for worse, I went straight to percussion. And I think when I was very young, I got to see, whether it was the marching band at the football games for the school my father was a band director at, or even just listening to the stuff that they played on the stereo — there was always a lot of classical music, but there was a lot of jazz in my house on the stereo all the time. And even The Beatles, music of the sixties.
I was pretty rounded, normal upbringing. I was playing soccer and baseball and basketball through high school, and I played in a youth orchestra, which was a huge influence on me, obviously.
I was in eighth grade. There were juniors and seniors in high school. They were into a lot of other kinds of music as well. Being a drummer, a percussionist, I think you have to love drumming, so you’re going to be influenced by other forms of music, primarily jazz and some rock and funk.
And I was accepted into schools and decided where I was going to go. I think I knew, with the help of people that I had met in my life playing percussion and also my parents, I knew that now’s the time to give everything you have to this. The success I sort of put on my shoulders, success or failure of it, completely. So the second I got to college, I worked as hard as I’ve ever worked or harder, practiced insane hours. I would wake up earlier than I ever did before in my life.
You certainly couldn’t make it in this business without a work ethic, and I know you definitely couldn’t survive without a work ethic. Even as a student with an unawareness of what the job is, you knew somehow, deep down, that that level of excellence takes an extreme amount of preparation. So that work ethic, it just becomes obvious. There’s a responsibility to sort of try to be as great as The Cleveland Orchestra that you know.
I had never been to Cleveland until I auditioned for The Cleveland Orchestra. I had seen the Orchestra at Carnegie Hall a number of times when I was a student. I used to try to get tickets. They would always sell out. And if I couldn’t get a ticket, I would wait till intermission. And if someone was leaving after the concerto, I would ask them for their ticket stub and try to see the second half at least. That and the recordings were my knowledge of what The Cleveland Orchestra was, and I was always enamored by it and always knew it was the best.
When I got here, seeing full halls, fully-attended concerts at Severance and seeing people sort of have the knowledge and the patience and the excitement to sit through concerts with challenging music, very challenging music, not things that they know necessarily was — it’s still, to this day, it’s impressive to me that people are choosing to spend their free time and money to enjoy something that is being done that’s great that they might not even always understand. That’s an impressive thing in an audience.
Messiaen, Chronochromie is a piece that was recorded by the Orchestra and Boulez, and The Cleveland Orchestra, I would say out of all of the American orchestras, was always known for playing the works of Messiaen. And all of his music has a very spiritual component and a component of using the sounds of different birds, and the xylophone — it’s a perfect character for that.
The meters are crazy. It’s very fast. And honestly, I had no idea — I was thinking to myself, I don’t know what I’m going to have to do if I have to look up and look at the music and be able to see the keyboard, because it goes by so quick. And in the first rehearsal, Franz, as I heard that Boulez did, as well, just gave us a cue to start us and then let us play, so it was a real cadenza.
Steve Reich, one of the original great minimalist composers in America, on the New York scene, originally, he formed an ensemble and taught them his music, and they went around playing it, and then because of some conductors, got Steve writing more for the orchestra. The music doesn’t get played all that much, but what does get played is his music that was written for his ensemble, and now, playing the Nagoya Marimbas with my colleague, Tom Sherwood, was such a joy to get to do on stage of Severance.
I think it sort of brings into focus a lot of the aspects of being a percussionist. There’s melodic and harmonic elements on the mallet instruments. And there’s a feel and a rhythm that comes with not just drumming, but having played other drumming music, whether it’s jazz or rudimental music. It’s not that any of that specifically translates to playing Steve’s music, but by being a drummer, you learn how to feel rhythm a certain way. And that’s what translates to playing has music. It has a swing to it. Sounds original to this day, like a lot of great music.
Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade. It’s a classic example of section percussion playing in the orchestra. There’s a great snare drum part. There’s a great cymbal part. There’s a great triangle part. There’s a great tambourine part. They all play together at times, and it exposes — it sort of is a great example of section, what a section can sound like in the orchestra and what a soloist can sound like as a percussionist within the orchestra.
I play the snare drum part on this recording that we’re going to listen to. It’s a part we play at auditions because it shows a lot, shows a lot about your control, your time, your facility. But once you get it into the orchestra, it really all becomes about fitting in, and the feel, the feel of the part relating to the piece and the people you’re playing with.
The snare drum part is this military-esque part that plays with the trumpets often throughout the fourth movement. It accompanies the clarinet in the third movement, sort of sets up a swing for the melody that they’re playing. Shows all those different roles that a percussionist is always jumping back and forth from.
Whether I’m playing one cymbal crash, if it’s a great note in great music or a triangle part in a Dvořák Slavonic dance or snare drum part Rimsky-Korsakov, none of it is ever dull. It’s always the greatest thing I could possibly be doing because it’s part of this great music with a great orchestra.
One time, when we were doing Miraculous Mandarin with the Joffrey Ballet and Franz is conducting, and he said, I was playing cymbals, and he said, “Marc, can you make that cymbal crash really sound like a dark, hazy alley in New York at four in the morning?” And that has to mean something in the split second that you try it again to get a result, and that is the essence of being a percussionist.
That was Marc Damoulakis, getting into the rhythm of Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. We hope you’ll stick around for the fourth movement coming up next. It was recorded live in Severance Hall in 2018. And if you want to make sure you don’t miss a beat, subscribe to On a Personal Note wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us at clevelandorchestra.com/podcast.