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
Let’s just go ahead and skip directly to the conclusion. Drummers have always been serious, creative, industrious, funny, and—yes—smart. If this is somehow news to you, please keep reading. If you, or someone you love is a drummer, share this post.
For as long as I can remember, musicians have enjoyed a merry “war of wits” by poking fun at each other with jokes made at the expense of others. No instrument, voice, or conductor is spared from these jovial jabs. Viola and singer jokes perhaps dominate the list, but it’s all in jest—right? —or is it?
Historically, drummers and percussionists (fancy name for a drummer) have always enjoyed a good laugh. We were never afraid to laugh at ourselves or poke fun at others. Unfortunately, people sometimes misinterpret humor as a lack of intelligence, seriousness, or ability. When it comes to drummer jokes one gets the feeling that there is a bit of an edge to these baleful barbs.
Perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but something happened along the way and percussionists began to quietly take offense at these jokes, particularly mean-spirited ones.
I mean, there is no real reason that a “drummer without a girlfriend would necessarily be homeless,” or that “you would know the riser is level when the drool comes out of both sides of the drummer’s mouth.” Well, that’s just plain mean (but still kinda funny).
But can a drummer be both smart and funny?
My long-time mentor Dick Schory (of Percussion Pops Orchestra fame) would tell me that he and his colleagues Bobby Christian, Thomas L. Davis, Tom Brown, and others “were very serious about what we were doing; we just didn’t take ourselves too seriously.” They weren’t afraid to be funny—even silly by modern standards. They could lean into the humor because the musicianship and artistry would speak for itself. It was a given, but it may also have worked against modern percussionists.
Photo shoot from the album Music for Bang, Barooom, and Harp by Dick Schory and the Percussion Pops Orchestra. Schory under a ponderous pile of percussion.
You might think “the percussionist doth protest too much,” but I for one have experienced real discrimination because I was assumed to be just a “dumb drummer.” I’ve known extremely qualified people who have been denied promotions to certain types of positions simply because of such implicit biases.
This type of discrimination has caused people in certain academic positions to forget that they are still drummers at heart. They know deep down they love hitting stuff to make music but wouldn’t dare bring it up at a dinner party at the president’s house. They feel compelled to renounce their heritage—a history that is steeped in the traditions of Vaudeville, Spike Jones, The Percussion Pops Orchestra, PDQ Bach, the Blue Men Group, and many others. What did they all have in common? They possessed a keen sense of comedy, they were accomplished musicians, and they were quite serious about their work.
After I entered the ranks of higher education in 1985 and then as I continued my education as a doctoral student in Percussion Performance in the 1990s, I began to figure out why percussionists were slowly losing their sense of humor. It was time to get “serious.”
As a DMA candidate I was responsible to know everything about the art, craft, history, and lore of percussion but also, everything about classical music writ large including the music of Bach, Beethoven, and The Boys, how many pedals there are on a harp, and other musical minutiae.
It is reasonable to expect that an educated musician would know about music broadly speaking but if you were a violinist much of music history is YOUR history. Was everyone expected to also know the history and development of the marimba, steel pan, or drumset? Probably not.
It occurred to me that percussionists seemed to be held to a different standard, but I was OK with that because I had already developed an intellectual curiosity about music, art, history, languages, culture, and much more. This curiosity fueled my desire to learn for the rest of my life. It also informed my teaching, performing, and mentoring to this day.
It took longer to nearly kill my sense of humor; it was a close call.
It took longer to nearly kill my sense of humor, but it was a close call. Having fun with my colleague Jean Francois Charles on clarinets on a Dick Schory classic, Baby Bossa Nova.
Along the way I began to notice that many percussionists share the same passion for erudition as me and it became clear that—hey! — drummers are smart!
Here are some examples:
Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Mickey Hart
My first exposure to a drummer/scholar was reading Mickey Hart’s books Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Planet Drum, Spirit of Sound, and Songcatchers. Hart was one of the drummers for the grandfathers of the Jam Band movement, the Grateful Dead. He was a rock star who wanted to learn about the history of percussion, the stories, the legends, and the myths. He pursued this knowledge passionately, like a Bonafide Music Scholar. He collected stories and posted them on an enormous timeline of 3” by 5” cards nicknamed “the Anaconda” that encircled the walls inside his barn/studio on his Novato, California ranch. The Anaconda turned into the four books mentioned above.
My friend and duo partner of many years, Mat Britain, and I were inspired to collect quotes about percussion, music, and life as a result of reading Hart’s books. We still collect and share quotes and stories like baseball cards.
Gary Burton quote, oil on canvas by Alexis Alduenda.
Drummers such as David Garibaldi, Steve Smith, and others dug deep into the vocabulary of drummers of the past to develop their own unique voice. Their work was intellectual, thorough, and inspired, and as a result of their efforts, they developed a completely new lexicon of drumming simply by looking back, doing the research and analysis.
In the contemporary percussion world, there is Steven Schick who I met in 2000. He was an alumnus of the University of Iowa where I had recently become the second percussion professor in the history of the school and the successor of his teacher Thomas L. Davis.
Simply put, Schick was an enigma! A polyglot who was the most eloquent and intelligent thinker I had ever met, but like me, he was a drummer, a strange traveler in a hostile land.
But few musicians of any stripe have attained the level of influence on the musical world than that of Steven Schick. He set himself apart early on as the creator of an entire genre of musical performance—one of his own design. Dumb drummer—I think not.
The Percussionist’s Art, Steven Schick
He shared his artistic philosophy in his seminal book The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, which has become a standard text for composers, percussionists, and lovers of new music. In his review of the book, composer Steve Reich wrote: “Just Imagine, as Steven Schick points out, you (the percussionist) and your friend (the cellist) are walking along. She with her extremely expensive and tradition-hallowed cello, and you’re on the way to the junkyard to pick out the most clangorous brake drum you can find and from there to garden supplies to find really nice-sounding flowerpots.”
There’s that self-deprecating humor again, but don’t let it fool you!
Throughout my professional career, I’ve enjoyed many great opportunities to share ideas, meals, and (more than a few) drinks with some of the most brilliant minds in percussion. I’ve argued well into the wee-small-hours with percussion scholars such as Bob Becker (whose amazing book, Rudimental Arithmetic, I helped to edit), on topics from the arcane corners of rudimental drumming to the fringes of contemporary music.
These were stimulating, Illuminating, and edifying conversations that helped to shape my thinking about percussion as a noun (the art of), a verb (to percuss), an adjective (percussive) or an adverb (to strike percussively). These conversations clearly transcended anything remotely relating to “how many drummers it might take to screw in a light bulb.” *
I’m not saying that these conversations were devoid of humor. Far from it because percussionists can move easily from the sublime to the ridiculous, but we are just more guarded these days about who we allow to hear it.
The younger generation also holds great potential. One example among many is Professor Michael Compitello of Arizona State University. His writing is incredibly thoughtful and thought provoking. We’ve struck up a friendship based on our shared love of all things percussive (adjective: relating to or produced by percussion). His upcoming book will be a deep dive into several important topics, and I look forward to reading and responding more to the early drafts of his work. I wonder if he knows any drummer jokes…?
In the early 2000s, I discovered that by becoming one of the few tenured professors of percussion at a Research-One (R1) Institution who also held a completed doctorate in music that I would begin to be called upon to serve as an outside reviewer of other percussion faculty.
In twenty-plus years I have completed evaluations of over forty percussion professors at major universities across the country. What have I learned? Quite a lot actually. I often find that most percussion professors are overworked, misunderstood, and (to quote Shakespeare for a third time) “altogether misprized.”
This is because otherwise musically educated people don’t seem to know what goes into making music on percussion instruments. For this reason, I call what we do as percussionists “Attempting the Absurd.” Imagine making beautiful and compelling music on a pile of wooden or metal slats with yarn covered balls on sticks. That about sums it up for me. Read more about that here:
It is amazing how often a musician will begin a conversation with me by saying “I don’t know anything about percussion.” My response is almost always the same; “you know about music, right? You should judge us on the same criteria as you would any musician.”
The majority of those I have reviewed are producing robust levels of creative and scholarly work—recordings, videos, books, commissions, blogs, lectures, or podcasts. For the most part, they speak and write eloquently about their work as musicians who play percussion, and they teach everything from percussion studio to marching band, new music ensembles, jazz courses, world music, history of rock ‘n roll, and much more.
It is encouraging, however, that many of the drummers/percussionists I know still enjoy a good joke and have not lost their sense of humor entirely—yet. I hope that never happens but as Bob Dylan would say, “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
So, if you hear us make a self-deprecating drummer joke, don’t be confused. There is method behind the madness; a rich history mixed with quite a bit of intellectual rigor, discipline, creativity, wit, humility, and—yes—humor.
My experience is that many of the smartest people I know are some combination of writers, thinkers, humorists, scholars, poets, artists, comedians, and, as it happens, drummers.
The conclusion? Well, you know it already. Drummers are funny and smart, and the world is better for it.
One more thing before we go. The fact is that being funny takes wit, intelligence, creativity, and timing. There is an ancient show-biz truism that says, “dying is easy, comedy is hard,” but that discussion will have to wait for another day.
*In case you were wondering, “it takes ten drummers to screw in a light bulb; one to do the job and nine more to say that Steve Gadd could do it better.”
The above cartoon was created by my good friend Steve Smeltzer, whose work has appeared in publications such as Sweetwater Music Calendars, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Health Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and Better Homes and Gardens. He is the author of a book titled Fort Wayne in a Nutshell: A Cartoon Retrospective. Steve is also a darn good drummer and teacher!
Citations:
Hart, Mickey. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion, 1 January 1990, Harper San Francisco, ISBN 978-0062503749
Hart, Mickey. Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm, 1 January 1999, Harper Collins, ISBN 978-0062503978
Hart, Mickey. Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music, 1 October 1999, Grateful Dead Books, ISBN 1888358238
Hart, Mickey. Kostyal, KM. Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music, 1 June 2003, National Geographic, ASIN B0002UVA5W
Schick, Steven. The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, 15 May 2006, University of Rochester Press, ISBN 978-1580462143
Becker, Bob. Rudimental Arithmetic (A Drummer’s Study of Pattern and Rhythm), 17 September 2008, Keyboard Percussion Publications, ISBN 0982112661
Smeltzer, Steven. Fort Wayne in a Nutshell: A Cartoon Retrospective, 6 July 2024, ISBN 979-8332358968
