The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Sisters students felt the beat last week as they explored the language of the drum.

Niel DePonte, the Oregon Symphony's principal percussionist and the Oregon Ballet Theatre's music director/conductor, provided students in Arts Discovery program, the Americana Project, percussion classes and the band with four days of insight about percussion skills and musical technique, arrangement, composition and lyrical structure.

He helped students explore the creative process and better define an "approach to being a creative person," said Brad Tisdel, Americana Project Executive Director.

DePonte's residency in Sisters schools was made possible through a grant the arts program at Caldera received to bring the study of the role of the drum to Sisters.

"The grant was written ... specific to Sisters for Caldera to serve the community closest to Caldera," said Tisdel.

"Through drumming, kids form that relationship where they are responsible to a group of people, and it's just a wonderful way to learn, and that's a lot of what Caldera is about - honoring individuals in a group," middle school Arts Discovery and Americana Project instructor Kit Stafford said. Stafford sees the program that DePonte provided as very valuable to her students.

"Beyond the experience of drumming, the students are seeing filaments that go to all of music," she said.

DePonte helped students develop their own "system," their own language. They learned to be an ensemble "and express that music," Stafford said.

"It wasn't all about drumming per se," DePonte said.

Students working in teams created rhythmic motives - short, simple rhythmic ideas.

Although the exercise could have effectively been conducted using a range of percussion instruments, the middle schoolers used vocalization.

DePonte also conducted a "mock adjudication" with the high school's Symphonic Band and met with the high school's Americana Project students in small groups of five or six, enabling him to specifically address each group's need levels.

DePonte is the second artist to bring drumming to Sisters schools this year. In October master percussionist Hakim Muhammad spent a week teaching the drumming of Western Africa, specifically that of Senegal, to Stafford's Arts Discovery and Americana Project middle schoolers.

Caldera is a nonprofit arts education organization that fosters creativity among underserved youth and adults in schools and community centers throughout Portland, Central Oregon and at its Blue Lake facility 12 miles west of Sisters.

The organization is currently sponsoring a year-long project, "Celebration of the Drum," that is providing some 10,000 Oregon students the opportunity to work with world-class percussionists through residencies, workshops and performances.

According to DePonte each of these percussionists is bringing his individual knowledge about the family of percussion instruments based on his personal background and perspectives to Oregon's youth.

"My focus is on ... contemporary percussion, Western European music and basically what we would call Western percussion instruments," DePonte said.

DePonte is also the founder and president of the Portland-based non-profit arts education organization MetroArts Inc. For information visit http://www.metroartsinc.com.