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“The first time I played Anne was the Japan tour in '91,” remembers Dave Shephard. To be frank, he doesn't look the Anne part. His hair is neither red nor braided, and his beard doesn't immediately strike a viewer as one of Anne's more trademarkable features. When Dave says he “plays Anne,” he means that his summer job is as the percussionist for the mainstage Confederation Centre show.
His winter job is teaching percussion methods to students at the University of Prince Edward Island and (one day a week) at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. At UPEI, he works out of a bright, small room jammed wall-to-wall with marimbas, xylophones, tympanis, drum pads, and hand drums. In the window hang “chimes” made up of hundreds of keys hand-tied to a bar. “It's a bit like bar chimes, except made of keys,” Dave explains. He jangles them so they sound like a scene change in a Christmas movie, and he excuses them for “not [having] much differentiation in pitch.”
Dave Shephard is an inveterate percussionist. (“Sometimes, I go down the stairs in 6/8 time,” he says.) He was first introduced to percussion by an uncle who played drums for a pipe and drum band. Later, that same uncle suggested that Dave would be a good dance band drummer, and Dave began to seek out dance bands, drum and bugle bands, the PEI Regiment band, the Colonel Gray High School band, and, later, the PEI Symphony. In the process, he learned more and more styles and methods.
“I like to be involved in a lot of things,” he says, “but I'm more on the Classical side of things these days.” About ten years ago, he mostly got out of the late-night-every-night bar band scene to opt for day-to-day commitments on the mainstage and at the universities. Ever the enthusiast for variety, he also says, “I hope I'd feel comfortable if mainstage [Confederation Centre] did something totally eclectic—you know, from razmatazz to rap.”
A large part of being ready to take on eclectic styles is knowing the range of percussion instruments, their various characters and the many sounds each can produce. Dave says, “You can go to a bar, and someone might be hitting a cowbell. And sure, they're getting a sound out of it. But if you delve in . . . you can hit it with an open sound then get a dry sound. What are you going to do to get the sound you want?” In his classes, he says, “I might start with your basic tulp tulp tulp” on the cowbell, “then make it drop in pitch. Then you see [students'] eyes light up.”
Soon, the temptation to demonstrate one of the instruments—and to teach its uses—overtakes Dave. “With any instrument, there's a specific way it should be played.” He jumps to the side of a huge gong-like tam-tam. “You'd think the only thing you do with it is go bong,” he says. He begins to list and demonstrate other uses. He says, “You can drape beads over it to change the sound” then rattles sticks over the drums surfaces and scratches (to make a noise he calls “squeamish”). He talks about one score that called for the tam-tam to be slowly immersed in a bucket of water.
Contemporary composers and pop musicians alike are inventing new applications for percussion, inventing new instruments, and using more diverse instruments. Likewise, they are experimenting with odd and unusual time signatures. “This area has grown so immensely,” Dave enthuses. A recent concert by the UPEI Wind Symphony “kept six percussionists active throughout the concert.”
Despite a hectic schedule with students in two provinces and a summer season at Confederation Centre that last year saw Dave performing nine shows a week, “There are times—when you're doing ensembles and the kids are getting into it —I don't really feel like this is a job.”