Composing For Solo Snare With Sensory Percussion: Russell Wharton Talks Arcadia

Russell Wharton is a percussionist, composer, and arranger whose work often combines modern multimedia technology with traditional percussion instrumentation. He recently published Arcadia, the first-ever concert snare drum solo composed specifically for Sensory Percussion. Featuring an impressive array of hyper-detailed sequences, some of which contain hundreds of meticulously-programmed melodic samples, the piece is an epic journey through natural woodsy soundscapes, sub bass swells, and fluttery synth passages.

Arcadia is available for purchase on Russell's website, and it includes not only the sheet music, but also the full session file with hundreds of original samples ready to be performed! In Russell's own words: "The piece is completely plug-and-play; open the included file, play the notes on the page, and the music will come out."

We caught up with Russell to talk about how the piece came to be, and why his vision could only be achieved with Sensory Percussion. Read on below for the full interview:

How did you first hear about and eventually start using Sensory Percussion?

I saw a drummer using it at a show in 2017, and I thought it was the coolest thing that I ever saw. So that was just in the back of my mind for a long time, and then last year the opportunity came up to be commissioned to write a piece for Sensory Percussion. And I had to contain my excitement because I was just over the moon with the idea of getting to work with the system. So I got my hands on it and began tinkering and I realized, like, “This isn't actually that complicated.” You have to have some skills, but it's not crazy. Since then, I’ve also incorporated it with some high school marching bands I work with. So it was cool to think about how it would work in both a very large ensemble and also in a solo context.

When you’re writing for a large ensemble like that, how do you decide what comes from Sensory Percussion vs. a synth, for example?

When I’m writing for these ensembles, I don't want to use it for something that I could just put on a MIDI keyboard, which the ensemble already has and knows how to use. The elements that we used Sensory for were the elements that were highly rhythmic and kind of needed to be drummed, like they were best input with two sticks. So I guess it’s largely about the input mechanism. What's really exciting about it is the whole factor of like, “I didn't know that you could make those sounds out of drumming.” That's just exciting on its own.

So for one show, I was adapting the music from the movie Tenet, and one piece has this repeating synth figure that's got this pitch bendy element. Ludwig Göransson did the original soundtrack and I imagine he just kind of sequenced all of that and automated it, or maybe it was on an LFO or something, but we did it live. We could just kind of sample the entire thing, but marching bands are not usually allowed to have too many time-based samples.

So Sensory was perfect for that, because you get this pitch bend by programming the samples to go up a half step as you play towards the edge and then back down and when you play towards the center. And playing with a higher velocity, you could get a little bit more distortion out of it. So to me, that was a no-brainer as far as how Sensory could be used to interpret that music.

Shifting back to Arcadia, can you talk a little bit about the overall narrative arc of the piece?

So the piece starts with just a bunch of little clicky wood sounds, really short little woody type transients because I wanted to kind of give the feeling of walking through the woods and twigs snapping underfoot. And then underneath that, there's a woodblock that changes pitch based on where you hit on the head. It gets lower when you play closer to the center. I wanted it to be intuitive, like I wanted a drummer to go up to this and be like, “Oh, this kind of responds like a drum.”

And then when you hit the rim, it plays this melody note, and activates an arpeggiator, which is really just a sequencer set to “random” with a bunch of pitched synth harp samples inside of it. It's this little moment meant to represent when you're walking through the woods and then you round a corner and there's a deer standing there or there's like a sun beam through the trees. Just that “Oh my gosh” moment.

Then you hit the rim again and it's a new melody note and a new chord that comes out when you drum on the head. Most of the piece progresses with that basic structure. I spent a lot of time sitting at a piano, trying to come up with a chord progression and some melody notes that created the right sense of tension and release compositionally. And would hopefully be fun to play and just the right amount of challenging!

There's a couple times where I have these like sub bass notes mapped to just the very center of the head, and I set the velocity threshold to be really high. So you’ve got to really hit it hard and it creates this big boom. Which is very satisfying.

And then toward the end of the piece, it gets more free. The samples kind of get longer. And it becomes less like we're walking through the woods and more like we've come to a clearing and there's a waterfall and there's this grandeur to it.

So the piece is meant to take us on this journey of serenity and discovery, and then grandeur toward the end. And it's all just meant to conjure up the feeling that you get from a really nice hike. When the weather is perfect and it's a really beautiful place and you're with your friends and you're feeling good and you're just like, “That's what I needed.”

A typical Sensory Percussion preset is a somewhat static group of sounds, like a drum kit or a snare drum. But Arcadia definitely feels like it moves and evolves and changes a lot more than the typical set. How did you pull that off?

A lot of sequencers [laughs]. A lot of sequencers with a lot of steps and then mapping certain zones or gestures to the “next” button on that sequencer.

This piece is also a bit different than other things I’ve seen with Sensory because it’s not improvisatory, it's prepared. There was a need to be able to start in the middle, to be able to rehearse it without starting from the beginning. Because Sensory Percussion doesn’t have a traditional timeline or play button, I didn’t think this was possible. But we were able to create macro buttons for starting at specific measure numbers. So if you want to start at measure 27, here's a button you hit and it sets all the sequencers to the exact correct spot so that someone practicing can start at measure 27 and start there.

I don't think it's the type of thing the software was intended to do, but the software is so flexible and so reactive that it works anyway. My whole experience of working with Sensory is that I haven’t encountered a “no” yet. Like there hasn't been anything that I've said, “Can it do this?” and had the answer be “no”. There's always a way to make it do what you want it to do. And that's really exciting. It's really impressive.