Nancy Zeltsman, professor of marimba at the Berklee School of Music and the Boston Conservatory since 1993, has been a regular guest of Lawrence University for many years. Zeltsman is a solo percussionist who has specialized in marimba for over 40 years. This year, Zeltsman came to Lawrence to host two masterclasses as well as a guest recital, titled “Drinking Water,” which was held on Monday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. in Lawrence Memorial Chapel. At her recital, Zeltsman’s expertise was clear and shone through.
For those less familiar with percussive instruments, like myself, the marimba is an instrument that consists of wooden bars that are hit with wooden mallets. Underneath each wooden bar is a resonator pipe that works to amplify the harmonics of the notes. The result is a mellow, hypnotizing and airy tone that Zeltsman is able to manipulate with ease.
Zeltsman described that the series of pieces she would be playing were pieces that were all relatively new to her; they were ones that she had just learned the past semester during her fall sabbatical. She started out with a piece titled “Passatempi” by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, which consisted of four movements. It had a haunting and mesmerizing tone with silky notes that echoed throughout the Chapel. Zeltsman held two mallets in each of her hands in a V shape configuration. She bent her wrists and fingers to effortlessly control the placement of each mallet, and even when she had to stretch both hands to opposite ends of the marimba, she kept her rhythm and seemed to lean into every note. Throughout the whole performance, Zeltsman’s eyes seemed to be glued to her score, only occasionally glancing down at her hands for placement. The music seemed naturally fluid to her.
About halfway through the performance, a video was played, titled “The Past is in the Present: At Home With Gunther Schuller.” Gunther Schuller was a well-known composer, conductor and horn player. In the video, Schuller reflected on his career as well as his home and marriage. He spoke about how color was a vital component of his composing, as he viewed the instruments in an orchestra as “a fantastical spectacle of color.” Of his own compositions, he said that he believed that some people hated him for “writing all this terrible atonal music.”
Zeltsman then went on to perform a few more pieces, including two movements of Gunther Schuller’s “Marimbology,” which was richly eerie and remarkably suspenseful. Zeltsman spoke of Schuller as one of the most important teachers of her life. She said that she had wanted to show the video of him to help celebrate his 100th birthday this year in November, describing the video to be a “beautiful portrait of a one-of-a-kind genius musician.”
Zeltsman explained the title of her recital, “Drinking Water,” to be inspired by a memory of her elderly father sitting up after he had just woken up and taking a drink of water.
“Gradually his eyes began to sparkle, and he was like himself again,” she said. “I was thinking of the clear sense of renewal that brought him. It serves as a reminder that to lean into something as simple as that can help us see the possibility of a reset in our lives. It’s there all the time; we can reset ourselves.”