Paul Price and American percussion practices during the ‘Golden Age’ of higher education

Abstract

In 1950, percussionist and pedagogue Paul Price established an accredited collegiate percussion ensemble course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the first of its kind in the country. In this article, I argue that Price’s accreditation of the genre, coupled with his many other entrepreneurial initiatives, was made possible by the higher education’s renewed desire for democracy and intellectual achievement that emerged after World War II and ultimately led to percussion’s own ‘Golden Age’ that endured until the late 1970s. I achieve this objective by highlighting Price’s role as an institutional entrepreneur, as demonstrated through his relationships and compositional collaborations with two American composers of midcentury percussion works, Michael Colgrass and Vivian Fine. By advocating for new standards of learning, musicianship, and composition, Price negotiated institutionalized norms to help turn percussion into an art form worthy of professional performance standards, accredited courses, a thriving repertory, and institutional recognition in the United States. An investigation of the correlations between midcentury collegiate percussion practices and the patterns of change and growth evident in higher education at the time help illuminate the powerful influence of educational institutions on music discourse in the postwar era.