Word: timpani
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Percussion in a nearly pristine state, but not nearly so frightening as it might seem from the line-up of instruments (partial roster: three bass drums, seven timpani, three xylophones, a glockenspiel, a gunshot machine and five pebble-filled cocktail shakers). Especially designed for hi-fi fans, but one number (Happy Little Woodpile) has pop possibilities...
...walloped his bass drum and cymbals, zipped out a few flams, drags, rolls and paradiddles on the snare drum, tinkled the xylophone, banged the triangle and tambourine and rattled the castanets, shook a string of sleighbells in his teeth like a dog and wound up lying exhausted across his timpani. The kids enjoyed it as much as Goodman...
Professional Pride. Goodman took to drumming as a Boy Scout in Brooklyn (he thinks "Americans have special imagination and aptitude for drumming"). When he was in high school, he heard a concert by the Philharmonic, and was so fascinated by the timpani that he dashed backstage and asked to become the timpanist's pupil. Six years later his teacher retired, leaving 20-year-old Saul in charge of the percussion section...
...drum to bird whistles. Goodman plays on kettles he made himself in his Yonkers shop. Next to his pride in producing a perfectly sustained tone and his ability to tune his instruments to perfect pitch while the orchestra is playing, is his pride in his patented devices for simplified timpani tuning. He has sold kettledrums at $600 a pair to the major U.S. orchestras and to some foreign ones...
Conductor Richard Burgin reserved the humor for the end, probably quite unwittingly. Anyone familiar with Brahms' superb piano quartet could not help but be wary of a Schoenberg orchestration calling for two flutes, a piccolo, three oboes, five clarinets, four bassoons, full brass, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, eymbals, triangle, tambourine, Glockenspiel, xylophone, and strings. At the very best, these extra instruments were entirely superfluous to Brahms' musical intentions. At the worst, which was most of the time, they sounded like something Richard Strauss would have reconsidered even in his most beery moments. The percussion thumped, whanged, crashed, and tinkled...