Main Battery

An advanced piece for snare drum in the contemporary march style, from the book Contemporary Marches for Snare Drum. The time signature of this piece represents two primary beats to the bar, each containing nine 16th notes. Those nine 16th notes are themselves divided into three groups of three, such that an underlying dotted 8th note pulse is present. There were many ways in which I could have presented this piece, but the two groups of nine most closely represents how I built the snare drum's phrasing. To this end, the best approach is to turn to the layered subdivisions. Firstly, we can feel two primary beats, each with nine strokes. This larger division informed the overall musical content for each bar, including the accent placements. Within this, we can feel three groups of three three dotted 8th notes per beat, a subdivision supported by the bass drum. Once this metric foundation can be strongly felt, the phrasing within the piece should make sense. The unusual metric context of this piece meant that I had to consider how best to present the tempo. I settled on the dotted 8th note, as this had the stronger underlying pulse in terms of how we might set the metronome. With dotted 8th notes at 170bpm, we should strive to feel three 16th notes per click, combining to form the two larger groups of nine per bar.