With years of experience under his belt, percussionist and professor Casey Cangelosi provides a captivating live performance.
A violin player isn’t expected to play anything but the violin. But a percussionist is expected to play hundreds of instruments.
Casey Cangelosi, percussionist and professor at Concord University, has many years of experience writing and publishing his own music, receiving various awards and commissions along the way. While it is not uncommon for percussionists, Cangelosi said he plays over a hundred percussion instruments.
Cangelosi will perform pieces involving the marimba, snare drum and maracas. A percussionist is able to play a multitude of percussion instruments, unlike most other musicians who are not expected to play every instrument in a family.
“You have to be very well rounded,” said Seth Alexander, the treasurer of the Percussion Club and a junior studying percussion performance. “You have to be able to play with a big band on drum set, improvise on xylophone, play something very lyrical on the marimba, or play something in a concert band setting.”
Cangelosi said percussion is constantly evolving.
“The cool thing about being a percussionist today is that there’s so much new music being written for it,” Cangelosi said. “So if Mozart’s time was of the piano, and if Bach’s time was of the violin, then this era is the era of the percussionist.”
Fighting the notion that music only has entertainment value, Cangelosi stresses in his teaching that music is centered on emotional interaction.
As he played two notes on a piano that agreed with each other followed by two that were dissonant, Cangelosi described the value behind studying and performing music.
“Even music in its smallest, smallest elements, you have some kind of emotional reaction to it,” Cangelosi said, referring to the emotional response of the two notes. “So if you compile all that information it starts to be this big complex cocktail of self-discovery and emotional interaction. So what the literature says is that it’s really about studying ourselves.”
Incorporating digital playback in a method described as “electro-acoustic,” Cangelosi will use a technique he says most people do not commonly see.
“You have a digital pre-recorded playback track with an acoustic instrument,” Cangelosi said. “So the idea is that you can kind of get this new aesthetic where everything is timed out perfectly and all these things happen in sequence.”
Alexander said he was excited to see Cangelosi perform.
“He has a lot of confidence,” Alexander said, “He plays fantastically and blows everyone out of the water, and they’re like ‘How did that guy even do that?’ It’s astounding.”
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