Experience and Personal Service Mean Positive Results

Percussia’s members are more than some of New York’s finest musicians. They are also some of the city’s most experienced arts-in-education experts.

Artistic director Ingrid Gordon trained as a teaching artist at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center Institute, and has worked extensively with Brooklyn Academy of Music’s DanceAfrica program. She and her colleagues work with schools to design residencies and workshops that match their budgets and curriculum objectives, and can coordinate everything from in-class rehearsals to school-wide assemblies and shares.

That experience means positive results for you and your students.

Percussia’s customizable, interactive programs fulfill both New York City and New York State’s Learning Standards for the Arts, and the organization’s flexible hands-on workshops can also meet your school’s multicultural educational needs. Depending on the program you choose, Percussia can also arrange to bring traditional performers to your school for a concert or lecture-demonstration.

Your Arts Dollar Goes Further with Percussia

Dealing with a small, efficiently run organization like Percussia means not having to deal with the bureaucracy, delays and overhead of a larger arts organization. With Percussia, your money goes further, and you receive better value for your arts dollar.

The organization’s percussion-oriented approach also confers specific educational benefits.

Why Percussion?

To begin with, percussion music literally offers something for everyone. Unlike melodic instruments, such as violin and flute, percussion instruments (drums, bells, shakers) are immediately accessible to students of all ages, skill levels and musical backgrounds. Students can learn to play a piece of percussion music relatively quickly, and Percussia is careful to select pieces whose parts vary in complexity, ensuring that everyone from novices to experienced performers can participate to the full extent of their abilities.

Percussion instruments are also relatively inexpensive. Some can even be built by students themselves as part of a project.

Aside from rhythm, percussion develops a number of skills, including team work, hand-eye coordination, pattern recognition and memory.

Sample Programs

African Drums Talk:

Students discover how drums are used to communicate in African cultures by inventing rhythms based on contemporary, age-appropriate texts (AIM messages, favorite books, movies, games, favorite food, and so forth). By performing these rhythms as part of a group, students also learn about African cultures, geography, literature and folklore.

Poetic North India Rhythms:

Students are introduced to North Indian drumming and rhythmic improvisation through analogies to poetry, and by using an innovative, visually-oriented approach to creating rhythmic variations. All student compositions are recorded and performed by the teaching artist on authentic, North Indian tabla drums.

Afro-Cuban Roots

In this hands-on workshop, students learn all about Afro-Cuban music with Andrea Pryor de Manrique, Percussia’s resident expert on Afro-Cuban folkloric music. Students will also learn how traditional Afro-Cuban music informs contemporary Latin pop.