UT Tyler’s summer music camp for percussionists is coming up the week of June 19. Tyree Hastings is the director of the camp and the director of Percussion Studies for the university. He shares all the details about this opportunity for high school musicians who want to hone their skills.
Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. UT Tyler’s School of Performing Arts has put on its week long Jazz Camp for a number of years now. This will be the second year for the UT Tyler Brass Camp and the first year for the UT Tyler Percussion Camp. Joining us now to talk about the inaugural Percussion Camp is UT Tyler’s director of Percussion Studies, Dr. Tyree Hastings. Welcome.
Tyree Hastings: Thank you.
Mike Landess: Now, the first day of the camp is June 19, and I’m guessing there’s a lot of excitement and anticipation.
Tyree Hastings: There is. There is. We are very excited to kick this off and to see what happens.
Mike Landess: How many kids do you have signed up so far?
Tyree Hastings: So far, we have seven who are signed up, and the hope is to have somewhere between 15 to 20.
Mike Landess: And, and the registration is open until…
Tyree Hastings: It’s open until June 15.
Mike Landess: OK. Good enough. Now the first day of camp is the 19th. What will be in store for this batch of percussion campers who show up?
Tyree Hastings: Yeah. So on the 19th, the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna get together, and we’re gonna start out with just some fundamentals, and we’re gonna do that pretty much every day. And then we’ll break off into different ensembles. We’ll have drum line, and we’ll have percussion ensemble, and it’ll basically be a rotation. So students will, they’ll rotate from, they’ll be on drum line for part of the day. They’ll be in percussion ensemble for part of the day. And then we fill the other time with master classes on various subjects.
Mike Landess: Now this is for kids who are 13 to 18, and they have some experience, obviously.
Tyree Hastings: Yeah, the more experience that they have, the better. But it’s open to anybody who has, is able to basically read music, read rhythms. We’d be happy to help people that just want to learn how to play some percussion, but know how to read music.
Mike Landess: So that’s a key element there.
Tyree Hastings: Yeah.
Mike Landess: Now these kids are primarily school drum lines, orchestras, both as they come in?
Tyree Hastings: Yes. So most of them play, most of them play in their school, either middle school or high school. Most of them are, will be high school students because of the age range. Most of them play in either their marching band or their school band or orchestra. Here, most of ’em are gonna be from the Tyler community area.
Mike Landess: Will you have instructors beyond yourself? You’re the camp director, but will there be local musicians who will be a part of helping with this?
Tyree Hastings: Yeah, so I have two local percussion directors: one from Tyler Legacy High School and one from Jacksonville High School. They’re Darryl Montgomery and Preston Long, and they’re gonna be helping out in working with the students teaching.
Mike Landess: Now is this beyond drum line? Would you have like a drum kit set up? For somebody who wanted to play with, let’s say, like the Swoop Jazz Orchestra, or something like that. Is there anything for that type of drumming?
Tyree Hastings: So, we’re not really delving in drum set much because the week after, we’ve got the Jazz Camp, and so of course that’s gonna have a lot of the drum set component.
Mike Landess: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, this particular event — it’s taken a little while for it to come to pass. Did you have to lobby to get this one moving or was there interest, did they come to you?
Tyree Hastings: They actually came to me. I had several people come to me and ask me to start a Percussion Camp, and so I went ahead and went through the process of getting that going.
Mike Landess: I’m very interested to find out a little bit more about you, the camp director. I wanna take a wild guess and say that you probably started pulling your mom’s pots and pans out of the cabinets and wailing on them with the spoon. Is that accurate or not?
Tyree Hastings: That is accurate. I did do that. I was actually a pianist first though, so…
Mike Landess: Oh really? No kidding.
Tyree Hastings: I played piano. I did piano lessons for 7 years actually. From age seven to 14, and then I moved into percussion when I got into high school.
Mike Landess: And what was the impetus for that? Was there some, someone who was sort of a model for you, someone that you admired, and you wanted to do it, too?
Tyree Hastings: What happened was in, when I was in middle school, the only thing that you could do piano in was jazz band. And I wanted to be able to also be in band. So what happened was they put me on xylophone.
Mike Landess: I see.
Tyree Hastings: Because I could read piano music. And so they put me on xylophone. And when I got into high school was my first time seeing a marimba, which is just like a large xylophone.
And so I wanted to do marching band. They don’t really, at the time, synthesizers were uncommon in marching band. So they had, they put me into marching band, and I played marimba, and I just took off from there.
Mike Landess: Interesting story. Now, your education — you managed, you started in Utah, is that correct?
Tyree Hastings: No, I actually started in Washington, and then into Washington State.
Mike Landess: Yeah. Washington State and then to Utah, and then to the University of North Texas. Is that correct?
Tyree Hastings: Yes. Yes.
Mike Landess: Tell me a little bit about that journey. How did that come to be from Washington State to Tyler, Texas?
Tyree Hastings: Yeah, so I actually, so when I was in Washington State, I went to a pretty good high school. And when I was there, I had a couple different college professors reach out to me wanting me to go play with them. So I did. I went, and I played at Eastern Washington University, and I was there for my undergraduate degree. I did both music education and percussion performance and then decided to go the percussion performance route. So then, what I did is when I was getting ready to graduate, my professor recommended that I go to Brigham Young University and study with Ron Gruff. They were friends. They went to school together, and he thought that would be a good place for me to go. And I listened to him, took his advice, and it was phenomenal, really good, to take his advice on that. I went and studied with Ron Gruff. He was fantastic. He kicked me into gear on the things I needed to work on. And then I made it into the University of North Texas with Mark Ford and Paul Renick and Christopher Dean and was able to study with them. Finished my doctorate there. And before I actually finished my doctorate, I got a job here at UT Tyler.
Mike Landess: Interesting. And we’re very glad to have you here and leading this camp this time around. Now, what are your personal percussion preferences? Are there any particular percussion stars that stand out? Someone you say, “Now, that’s somebody who’s really amazing.”
Tyree Hastings: Yeah, I really like Third Coast Percussion. They’re a, they’re a group of percussionists. They won a couple Grammys doing percussion ensemble stuff, which is, you know, just pretty strange, out-there kind of music, but it’s it’s pretty fun.
And so I really like them. And then there’s a couple solo artists. I really like Ji Hye Jung. She’s the professor of Vanderbilt University. She’s phenomenal. And then Michael Burt’s another one of my favorites, and he’s a professor at Eastman School of Music.
Mike Landess: I saw a story not long ago talking about Steely Dan and some of their recordings, and they were looking for different ways to come up with sounds that made the particular recording they had stand out. As they’re deconstructing the song he says, “Wait a minute! That’s Ralph playing the trash can top, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. We went out and got a trash can top!”
Tyree Hastings: And if we’re talking more contemporary music, I really like Carter Buford, Dave Matthews band.
Mike Landess: Yeah. Yeah. All right, so to wrap up, this starts on the 19th. But people can register up until the 15th, is that correct?
Tyree Hastings: Yes.
Mike Landess: Good enough. Our guest has been UT Tyler Director of Percussion Studies Tyree Hastings. To find out more about the UT Tyler Percussion Camp, go to our website, KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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