2026 PAS Lifetime Achievement in Education Award Recipients

Join us in wishing congratulations to the distinguished recipients of this year’s Percussive Arts Society Lifetime Achievement in Education Award: Robert Chappell, Frédéric Macarez, and Linda Lorren Pimentel. These lifelong educators have contributed so much to our percussion community, we are excited to celebrate them alongside PAS Hall of Fame inductees and other award winners at this November’s Awards Banquet at PASIC 2026. Keep reading to learn more about each leader’s career.

Robert Chappell

Robert Chappell’s career has encompassed an inclusive range of musical styles and genres in performance, education and composition. After receiving degrees in percussion performance from the Ohio State University and the University of North Texas, Chappell’s interest in world percussion resulted in continued study of Ugandan amadinda xylophone, African drumming, and East Indian tabla (Ustad Zakir Hussain and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri). He received an Indo-American Research Fellowship for study with renowned tabla master, Ustad Alla Rakha, in Mumbai, India.

Robert has performed with Columbus, Ft. Worth, Dallas and Indianapolis Symphonies, and recorded and toured internationally with both the Paul Winter Consort and Rhythmic Union. Chappell has performed from 1992–2013 with steelpan virtuoso Liam Teague in the Liam Teague + Robert Chappell duo and their world-jazz group, Panoramic. Notable performances include the St. Lucia Jazz Festival, the National Concert Hall of Taiwan, the Seoul Drum Festival, the Chicago World Music Festival, the Trinidad and Tobago Jazz Festival, and performances at Percussive Arts Society International Conventions.

Active as an educator for 48 years, Chappell has taught at Indiana State University and is a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the Northern Illinois University (NIU) School of Music. He was the Program Director of the Percussion/Steelpan/World Music session at the Birch Creek Music Center from 1989 to 2013. From 2013 to 2020, Robert was a visiting professor at the Instituto Nacional de Música, (National Institute of Music), in San José, Costa Rica, where he started the first steel band in Latin America.

A composer in contemporary, jazz, and cross-cultural idioms, Robert’s compositions have been published by Marimba Productions, Panyard Publications, Pan Press, and Drop6 Media. His steel band composition, “Wood-N-Steel,” for Ugandan xylophone and Steel Band, was premiered by the NIU Steel Band at the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan, and an orchestrated version has been performed with the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Rockford Symphony and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a Wind Ensemble version performed at the Instituto Nacional de Música in San José, Costa Rica. “Wood-N-Steel” was the top scoring composition in two rounds of the World Steelband Festival held in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 2000 and helped NIU place second among 19 International and Trinidadian steel bands.

Robert is a Yamaha Performing Artist and endorsee of Sabian cymbals and Innovative Percussion mallets.

Frédéric Macarez

For nearly five decades, Frédéric Macarez has dedicated his career to percussion education, performance, and the transmission of musical knowledge to new generations of musicians.

A student of PAS Hall of Fame member Jacques Delécluse at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where he was unanimously awarded a Premier Prix in 1981, Macarez went on to a distinguished 37-year orchestral career. He served as Principal Percussionist of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande from 1981 to 1987 and joined the Orchestre de Paris in 1987, becoming Principal Timpanist in 1993, a position he held until 2016.

Alongside his performing career, education has always been central to his work. He taught at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris from 1991 to 2026, where he created and developed its Percussion Department. His former students include many professional orchestral percussionists and timpanists, as well as leading educators in France, Belgium, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico, and beyond.

An internationally active clinician and educator, Macarez presents masterclasses and clinics throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A committed advocate for the legacy of Jacques Delécluse, he continues to transmit and develop this tradition through teaching, performance, and projects devoted to Delécluse’s repertoire, particularly his landmark “12 Études for Snare Drum.”

Also active as a composer and editor, Macarez continues an international schedule of teaching, masterclasses, clinics, and performance. He is an artist and clinician for Tama, Zildjian, Vic Firth, and Evans.

Linda Lorren Pimentel

Linda Lorren Pimentel has shaped percussion education across a career spanning more than seven decades. Born in 1940, she began piano lessons in Michigan at age six and was soon drawn to the marimba. She was performing regularly on radio by 1948, made her television debut in 1951, and appeared at Carnegie Hall in a children’s concert while still young.

Pimentel earned her B.A. (with honors) and M.A. from San Jose State University, where she studied snare drum and multiple percussion with Anthony Cirone and timpani with Dr. Gary Olmstead, a PAS Past President. During those years she performed John Cage’s “4’33″” under the composer’s coaching, premiered works with Lou Harrison’s trio and Western Gamelan Gong, and accompanied PAS Hall of Fame marimbist Celso Hurtado. In 1968 she performed the “Creston Concertino for Marimba and Orchestra” with the San Francisco Symphony under Arthur Fiedler.

Her most lasting contribution has been to mallet pedagogy. While teaching piano, Pimentel began adapting contemporary and Baroque keyboard works for marimba and developing four-mallet independence through contrapuntal repertoire. That work became the foundation of her six-volume method series, including The Solo Marimbist, Bar Percussion Notebooks, and The Marimba Goes Baroque, still published by Per-Mus Publications. She shared her expertise with PAS members through the Percussive Notes columns “The Marimba Exchange” and “The Marimba Bar,” and excerpts of her Ohio State University PhD research on conductors’ interactions with the percussion section were published in PAS’s research journal, The Percussionist.

A lifelong educator, Pimentel taught at Ohio State, Denison, and Capital universities, and at Texas A&I University, where she was named Most Outstanding Fine Arts Professor. In 1982 she joined the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, serving as Music Education Chair, Director of Bands, and Percussion Instructor, and later helped train conductors in the University of Calgary Conducting Diploma Program to work more inclusively with percussion sections. As a Ludwig clinician, and later through international travel, she lectured and performed throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Even after retirement, Linda returned to the classroom to teach middle school band, choir, and orchestra in Tucson, Arizona.

Pimentel was one of the first two women to serve on the PAS Board of Directors, and at a PAS convention in Knoxville she helped premiere a concerto for three percussionists and orchestra alongside Vic Firth and Peter Erskine. She has also served on the boards of the Alberta Band Association, the Canadian Band Association, and the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles. Her archives and her Musser M-250 marimba are held at the Wells Rapp Center for Mallet Percussion Research, where she is featured in the “Women in Marimba” exhibit, and in 2017 the University of Lethbridge awarded her an honorary Doctor of Musical Arts.