Today’s blog post asks the question, what do drummers and the Olympics have in common? More than you might expect actually, so read on my friend, to receive enlightenment.
February was full of talk about the Olympics which seem nearly as ubiquitous as elections these days since both come around every two years like it or not. Alternating between Winter and Summer, the games fill our television screens, laptops and iPhones with amazing feats of physical strength, balance, dexterity, and grace under pressure.
“If there was no one on Earth, I would still skate.” Alysa Liu performs her free skate at the US figure skating championship in Wichita, Kansas in 2025. Photograph: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Most all the skills that are on display at the Olympics are those that normal humans don’t possess. Events like cross-country skiing (the worst sport ever invented, based on my experience as a former Montanan) and curling, which has somehow captured my (and everyone else’s) imagination during this year’s games, feature skills far above that of the average person! Even curling which is evidently the province of extremely limber soccer moms who yell a lot.
Photo by: USA Today Sports
The first Olympic games took place in Greece in 776 BC but were ended in AD 393 by the Roman emperor Theodosius I, who was probably very unathletic and didn’t look good in spandex sportswear. Then, in the late 1800s a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin brought the games back to life and in so doing, introduced the motto of the modern Olympics: Citius, Altius, Fortius which translated from Latin means “Faster, Higher, Stronger.”
Beyond the obvious comparison that drummers are also big fans of the idea of “faster, higher, and stronger,” there are other aspects of Olympism that resonate with the drumming community.
According to the World Olympic Association (WOA), “as Coubertin was planning the modern Olympic Games in the 1890s the idea of Olympism became more clearly defined. In the Olympic Charter it is expressed as ‘a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.’”
Let’s put this another way. “Blending sport [i.e. drumming] with culture and education, Olympism [drumming] seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort,” drumming, check, “the educational value of good example,” again, drumming, “social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” Well, that’s what drumming is all about, Charlie Brown.
But what else do drumming and the Olympics have in common?
Several years ago, Russell Hartenberger of the Percussion Group Nexus wrote a blog post entitled “Snare Drum Olympics.” In the post he writes, “[w]hen I taught percussion at the University of Toronto, I encouraged the first-year students to spend a large portion of their practice time on snare drum. However, as I began to assign them repertoire on other percussion instruments, I saw that their attention to snare drum dwindled. In order to encourage them to continue practicing snare drum, I came up with the idea of an annual Snare Drum Olympics.”
Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto.
Russell goes on to say that the idea for the Snare Drum Olympics harkened back to his days as a student and a “shameless prank” he “perpetrated with a fellow percussionist” at the Curtis Institute in the 1960s.
I should just let Russell tell you the rest of the story:
“The percussion studio at Curtis at that time happened to be right next to the music theory classroom. One of the rules at Curtis was that personal practice took precedence over everything else, so my friend and I knew that we could play as loud and long as we wanted in the percussion room and no one would tell us to stop. One day, while a music theory class was in progress, my percussion buddy and I decided that we would play a fortissimo snare drum roll for the complete hour of the class to see if we could get away with it. No one stopped us, as per Curtis regulations, so we rolled non-stop for an hour. I confess that we varied our dynamics so we weren’t constantly playing as loud as we could, but we didn’t stop playing for an entire hour.”
“The excitement of this shenanigan helped me keep up the energy to roll for an hour, but I realized I also had to make some physical and mental adjustments to stop tension from building in my hands and arms. I discovered that if I began to feel my hands tightening, I could move the tension to other parts of my body by focusing on the affected area, breathing into it and mentally shifting the tension to a different muscle group. A few years later, when I started practicing yoga, I learned that this is one of the principles of that discipline, and I began to experiment with it in other areas of my percussion playing.” —Russell Hartenberger
I discovered that if I began to feel my hands tightening, I could move the tension to other parts of my body by focusing on the affected area, breathing into it and mentally shifting the tension to a different muscle group.
Russell Hartenberger
The concept of repetition and building stamina in drumming is a time-honored tradition. In the early 1970s and some 1400 miles away from Philadelphia and the Curtis Institute, in an East Texas schoolyard, my best drumming friend—slash—arch rival for chair placement in the Junior High School band and I used to meet up after school to try and see who could roll the longest on a snare drum without stopping.
Of course, there would always be a small cadre of curious onlookers there to view our “shenanigan” and cheer us on including, of course, some cute girls we were trying to impress. Regardless of the motivation for our Snare Drum Olympics, it served the purpose of helping us develop patience, control, and endurance for extended drumming in the same way that Russell had discovered shifting tension to different parts of his body just a few years earlier.
We might’ve thought that an hour-long roll would probably contribute to helping us make a two-measure roll sound pretty good or maybe just improve our chances to get a date for the skating rink on Saturday night (note: it didn’t) but at the time we were mostly interested—as you might imagine—in the whole citius, altius, fortius paradigm. One thing for sure is that playing faster, higher, and stronger for long periods of time paid dividends for us as drummers later on.
When I got to college, we started an “afterhours long-roll club” after a friend of mine came back from the Navy School of Music and told us about the techniques they used for roll development and stamina. It was a more regimented approach that involved sustaining an open double stroke roll at around 80-90 beats per minute for an hour. We would focus on the right-hand pulse for ten minutes then shift the focus to the left hand for ten minutes and repeat this sequence for an hour. After the first round, we would take a break to goof off around the music building and then set the metronome 5-beats per minute faster and roll as long as we could. The last drummer standing was declared the winner of the night. Citius, altius, fortius,ego sum victor (to keep it in the Latin vibe)!
Hartenberger’s Snare Drum Olympics were so successful that they became an elaborate yearly event that continued through to his retirement from the University of Toronto. You can read more about their three-day spectacle here: https://www.nexuspercussion.com/2021/03/snare-drum-olympics/
The Britain Moore Duo just moments before a breakout of the “timbale Olympics” at the Cincinnati Waterfront on the Ohio River, circa 1993. Bassist Bill Jackson seems less excited about the impending display…
In another (less serious) example of the Olympic influence on percussion, my duo partner Mat Britain and I used to have a part of our performances that we referred to as the “Timbale Olympics” in which we battled over a pair of timbales in a loosely choreographed rhythmic dance. It always brought the house down because it was a show of drumming skills that were (you guessed it) faster, higher, and stronger than that of normal humans. At least our audiences thought so. It remains a term to describe the omnipresent timbale solos heard at nearly every Iowa Steel Band Performance.
The fact is that there may never be drumming in the Olympics, but if someday it happens, just know that we drummers will be ready! Citius, Altius, Fortius, Ya’ll!
And one more thing before we go:
Russell Hartenberger wrote about his energy-shifting technique in an article titled “A Different Kind of Virtuosity,” for the book, The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm. In it, he describes energy-shifting in this way:
“In playing [Steve] Reich’s music and West African drumming, I use something I call energy-shifting, a technique I developed from practicing yoga postures and breathing exercises. I find that it is necessary to have a certain amount of tension while playing in order to produce a strong, centered sound, especially when I have to generate this sound with consistency over long periods of time. In order to prevent tension build-up, I keep up the necessary energy by shifting the tension around in my body. For example, if I feel tension mounting in my wrists, I concentrate on releasing the tightness by focusing my breathing in that area and allowing my arms or another part of my body to absorb the tension. By practicing this technique, I developed the ability to energy-shift quickly and easily.”
NEXUS, African drumming circa 1986. L to R, Bob Becker, the late Robin Engelman, the late John Wyre, Russell Hartenberger, unidentified dancing baby, and William Cahn.
Citations:
Li, Helen. ‘If there was no one on Earth, I would still skate’: Alysa Liu on her remarkable figure skating comeback, The Guardian On Line, 26 March 2025
One Reply to “Olympics for Drummers: Citius, Altius, Fortius!”
If you saw an earlier version of this post, you will know that I mistakenly attributed the Snare Drum Olympics to Bob Becker of the Percussion Group Nexus. It was Bob who noticed my error and pointed out that it was actually his colleague and friend Russell Hartenberger who created the Snare Drum Olympics saying “I would be incredibly proud of being the source of everything in your blog post, except I’m not.” He went on to say that “This is actually kind of funny, and reminds me of the kind of thing that [Robin] Engelman might have done. Russ will agree, that he and I have been mistaken for one another throughout our careers.” Well if I have something in common with my late friend Robin Engleman, I’m OK with that.
If you saw an earlier version of this post, you will know that I mistakenly attributed the Snare Drum Olympics to Bob Becker of the Percussion Group Nexus. It was Bob who noticed my error and pointed out that it was actually his colleague and friend Russell Hartenberger who created the Snare Drum Olympics saying “I would be incredibly proud of being the source of everything in your blog post, except I’m not.” He went on to say that “This is actually kind of funny, and reminds me of the kind of thing that [Robin] Engelman might have done. Russ will agree, that he and I have been mistaken for one another throughout our careers.” Well if I have something in common with my late friend Robin Engleman, I’m OK with that.