Drumming up a bit of support

With the help of half a mile of wooden sticks and thousands of sleighbells, Noel Eccles is about to bring the rhythmic art of percussion to the masses, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

IT SOUNDS LIKE a great idea. Get hold of some of the best percussionists Ireland has to offer, and get them on stage together at the National Concert Hall. Then get the audience involved. Encourage adults to bring a responsible child along (and vice versa). As they enter the hall, give them a package containing a couple of percussion instruments because the audience will also be – as the saying goes – an integral part of the performance.

A great idea. And, as Noel Eccles points out, a logistical nightmare. “Two truckloads of equipment,” he counts on his fingers. “Half a mile of wooden sticks. Bells.” He looks up from his latte and grins. “I’m huge in the morris dancing world, because I’ve ordered so many sleighbells: two-and-a-half thousand of them.” The Moving Hearts drummer and one-time principal percussionist with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) doesn’t, it must be said, look like a man who’s trapped in a logistical nightmare. He looks like he’s having the time of his life.

Eccles is responsible for putting this aptly named Percussion Spectacular together; he’s also composing a new piece for the occasion. It’s a task to make a less hardy soul quake – but then, this is the man who spent days experimenting with an empty tomato can and various quantities of rice to get exactly the kind of shaker effect he wanted for a U2 album. The Belfast-born percussionist has been involved in a number of high-profile outings in his 30 years in the business, from Shaun Davey’s Brendan Voyage through Riverdance to the Special Olympics.

“One of the things we did for the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in 2003 was, we had 150 percussionists on stage to welcome in the Olympic flag,” he says. “The power of that had always appealed to me — but it’s organised power. It’s not 150 people doing what they want to do. It was orchestrated. Everybody learned their part. So the idea of doing that kind of event in a concert hall setting really appealed to me.”

This event aims to invoke a very different emotional response to that of the traditional classical concert. “A lot of the time when people go to concerts, they don’t get involved. And especially somewhere like the concert hall, where great art is performed. It is very much a spectator sport at times. The idea here is to make people feel that they’re actually taking part in what’s happening on stage.”

There is, of course, a risk that the whole thing will get out of control. If you give people something to shake, how do you stop them from shaking their stuff all the time? “I’m hoping for a little bit of peer pressure on that,” Eccles says. “A little bit of competition between the different parts of the hall, maybe.”

But it wouldn’t do to run away with the notion that this is a mammoth session of community drumming. It will be partly that, but it will also be a concert given by 22 assorted percussionists who are all at the top of their game. “We have the percussion sections from the RTÉ NSO and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra,” says Eccles. “Then we have freelance players from around town, as well as people who have just finished degree courses at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and students from the College of Music. There’ll be timpanists and marimbas and xylophones and vibraphones and tubular bells.”

There are also plans afoot to have players doing their thing in various parts of the hall as the audience enters, to allow people to get up really close and see what exactly the musicians are up to. Eccles hopes the event will open people’s eyes and ears to the potential of percussion.

“It’s not all about drums. It’s not all about making loads of noise. We actually know the power of our instruments: dynamically and musically, we can portray what’s written on the page. As a percussionist, you’re like a fireman. You’re sitting at the back of the orchestra waiting for the fire to happen. And then it happens, you do your bit and you sit back down again.”

The concert will begin with the aforementioned Special Olympics piece. “A big piece,” as Eccles describes it, “which begins with an Irish feel, then goes into an Arabic feel, then samba, then salsa. Then Japanese taiko drums and finally African. As each group joins in, the others keep playing so it ends up with them all playing together.” Next up will be a pair of Scottish pipe drummers from the North, followed by an arrangement of “a very well-known piece from a Russian ballet”, followed by a group called Street Beats doing “the kind of thing you’d see in the subways of New York – guys playing buckets and things”.

The climax of the evening will be the premiere of the as-yet-unnamed new piece.

Eccles’s own passion for percussion began in childhood. “I wanted to play drums from a very young age,” he says. “I spent years playing on the top of the kitchen table. I can remember seeing The Beatles on telly and thinking, ‘I want to be Ringo Starr’.”

Instead, he went the classical route; he was accepted into the Belfast School of Music, where he received a formal musical training in the orchestral style. By the time he did his A-levels, he had a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London. “But I got some work with the Symphony Orchestra here in Dublin, ended up getting the job as principal percussionist, and stayed for 17 years.”

At the same time, however, he always kept in touch with other kinds of music, getting all kinds of work, from musical society productions of Oklahoma! to recording sessions for film soundtracks. He also became very closely involved with traditional music in the shape of Moving Hearts, with whom he has just finished a tour of Ireland. It’s a broad career spectrum which embraces a vast selection of very different instruments – but that, he says, is par for the percussion course.

“Symphony orchestra players do everything. Sometimes you’re asked to play coconut shells, or break glasses. As a professional in the business, it has become harder for us, in that you’re expected to know about everything. You might arrive in to do a soundtrack recording and someone says, ‘Oh we want you to play a doumbek’. People are inventing new percussion instruments all the time. It’s an ever-expanding world that you have to try and keep on top of.”

The main requirement for a first-class percussionist, however, is the ability to maintain a pulse – which is not at all as straightforward as it might sound. A good sense of time, as Eccles explains it, is not just a matter of ticking away as reliably as a metronome. “The time is where you place the notes. Great musicians are able to place the notes somewhere that makes one feel easy – they’re able to do it in a way that you don’t feel anxious or too relaxed. It’s not too ‘on’ the beat, either. That’s what we call good time. That’s why certain pop records work so well.” By way of example he cites Steve Gadd’s drum line in the Paul Simon song Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.

“But there are also times when you get a symphony orchestra, and it’s powering along – you can be pulled into that as well. Even when it’s playing very quietly, there’s still a pulse within it. And there’s an expectation from the pulse in music that it will lead you somewhere. It’s a narrative line.” In his insistence on this, Eccles begs to differ from those who insist that melody acts as the narrative line in music. “All music has to do with rhythm,” he says firmly. “Even if it has to do with the length of the silences as against the length of the notes. Think of the excitement people feel when they hear a lot of things happening at the same time. I was involved with Riverdance for a long time – and what sold it was the unanimity of that line of dancers delivering this very intricate thing to an audience. There’s something very exciting about bodies doing something together, whether it’s the Mexican wave at Croke Park or whatever. With a tam-tam or a large bass drum, people will actually feel those vibrations in their own bodies. Then, when you contrast that with stillness . . . with one note you can fill the National Concert Hall. With one quiet note.

“If people say percussion is devoid of melody, maybe they haven’t heard the right things.”

Noel Eccles leads the Percussion Spectacular, presented by RTÉ and Rhythm Lag, and hosted by Brian Ormond, at the National Concert Hall on Sunday October 4th at 1.05pm. For more details, see rte.ie/performinggroups