Whether you are a freelance musician, university teacher, orchestral performer, or all of these at once, adapting your percussion performance skills to facilitate interactive group drumming is a great way to add to a marketable activity to your career. In the rapidly changing 21st Century job market with fewer traditional performing and teaching opportunities for the overabundance of music school graduates, drum circle facilitation can fit nicely into an early career percussionist’s schedule where most private teaching, drum line coaching, or regional orchestra activities take place in the afternoon and evening. Community Drum Facilitation is an impactful way for percussion professors to enhance the university student experience beyond the music department that will be noticed by the upper administration. Most importantly, it is a valuable community service in a post-pandemic world experiencing both a mental health crisis and the largest aging population in history.

This hands-on workshop will introduce the PASIC audience to an adaptation of the HealthRHYTHMS protocol named Comfort Sound® Drumming, discuss its use in healthcare settings including research studies, and demonstrate how drum circle facilitation techniques can be used in a wide variety of settings, from college campuses during orientation and exams, to percussion ensemble rehearsals, for seniors in memory care, public school music programs, and pre-school Head Start centers. The clinician will provide Remo Versa Tubanos with Comfort Sound Technology® low volume drumheads and plastic egg shakers.