When Christie Kosal teaches at Vero Beach High School, she is rarely without a mallet. Not that she’s rapping knuckles, though if that sound were appealing, she might.
Kosal, who doubles as the choral teacher at Gifford Middle School, teaches percussion at the high school. Her charge is the group known as front ensemble, the stationary section of the marching band. Along with timpani, she specializes in the marimba, a wood-and-metal, table-size instrument on a frame that gets rolled onto the field before game time.
For her advanced students, she holds two mallets in each hand, manipulating them like chopsticks over the wooden keys of the marimba. Once the mallet is over a key, the player must strike the key at the right instant, changing intervals between mallets to play chords. “Four mallets doubles that challenge,” Kosal says.
Marimba soloists like Kosal were a rarity until the 1980s or so. Specialized teachers of marimba are still uncommon, though, increasingly, colleges are requiring percussion students to include the instrument in their studies.
Managing the mallets is phenomenally tricky to teach, she says. Kids start out with two, learning the layout of the notes. But she pushes hard to get them to four, a wrist-twisting, elbows-akimbo feat of rhythmic nimbleness.
“This is the world now, it’s about the four mallets,” she says, as if percussion were their destiny.
For her, it certainly has been. A 2014 cum laude graduate of the University of Florida in music education, Kosal next month will be teaching for the second year at the Treasure Coast Percussion Camp. The remarkable week-long camp held at Vero Beach High School brings in clinicians from around the country, ranging from a former member of the Blue Man Group to university professors.
Launched 12 years ago by Vero natives Brandon Putzke and Michael Sammons, the camp has drawn up to 165 students per session. Instructors teach everything from marching band to world music on a vast array of instruments – including their own bodies.
That last technique, called body percussion, was part of Kosal’s senior recital at UF. A quartet of body percussionists played “Me Tarzan”; chest-pounding figured prominently in the piece. Kosal, in the part of Jane, was at an obvious disadvantage.
“I didn’t have the very best, uh, stomach,” she says. “The boys had a deeper sound.”
She did, however, get a standing ovation in a multi-percussion piece called “Sex in the Kitchen,” a fierce 12-minute drum duet that included her cracking a whip and sending a table set for two clattering to the stage floor.
Along with timpani, which she played in the UF Orchestra, Kosal is a star on the marimba.
Related to the xylophone and vibraphone, the marimba shares its origins in Africa and Central America. Its four to five octaves of wooden bars span a frame the width of a dining room table. Beneath each key hangs a finely tuned metal tube through which the sound resonates.
In the last century, that rich, ringing tone, mellowed by a softer mallet or punctuated with a harder one, has inspired composers of not only jazz but contemporary classical repertoire to create new music for the marimba.
In childhood, Kosal studied violin. She excelled at in her middle school orchestra in Spring Hill, a small city north of Tampa. But when she started high school, there was no orchestra program. Already feeling lost after a mid-semester transfer – she needed a school with A.P. classes – Kosal realized that what she was still missing was music.
“I was sitting in art class next door to the band room, and I could hear the band playing, and I knew I just wanted to play music. So I went over to the band director and said ‘I can read music.’ He put me in the front ensemble and the marching band. I had no clue what I was doing when I joined, and I just started to love it.”
That first year, like most beginning percussion students, she played only bass drum, tambourine and cymbals. By the second year, though, she was learning marimba.
As it turned out, the public school music program would help her through a very rough ninth-grade year. Her pricey private violin lessons fell by the wayside when Christie’s father, fighting hepatitis C, needed a liver transplant. He got one, at UF Health Shands Hospital, and his care there moved Kosal to vow she would one day be a UF graduate.
“My father had an extra year of life because of a liver transplant at UF Shands,” she says. “Ever since then, I’ve had this loyalty to UF.”
Admitted as a civil engineering and physics major, Kosal again found herself at loose ends. “Freshman year was a very difficult year for me. I kept wanting to go home every weekend and go to high school football games and visit my band director,” she says. “Something was not right.”
In an attempt to feel a part of things, she joined the rowing club. The training included 5-mile runs, and though she runs marathons now, she hated running then. One day, the run took her right past the practice field for the UF marching band.
“I was miserable. I was almost ready to cry, I wanted to be out there so bad,” she recalls.
The next day, she quit crew and joined the marching band. Among her professors was Dr. Kenneth Broadway, who was a clinician at the 2009 Treasure Coast Percussion Camp.
Today, along with a certificate in performance, Kosal has a degree in music education which allows her to teach any field of music from kindergarten through high school. Having taken up the violin again in college, she can teach orchestra as well as band. She also discovered a love for choral conducting, and today, after a year teaching music at Glendale Elementary, Kosal teaches chorus at Gifford Middle School, in addition to teaching percussion at Vero High.
In both arenas, it’s easy for her to remember the hardest thing about learning to perform: taking criticism well. Particularly in percussion, where “usually you are the loudest, loudest person in the entire group,” getting used to embarrassment is an essential skill.
She describes the anxiety of playing timpani for the UF Orchestra, an instrument she grew to love, but that was utterly unforgiving of mistakes. “You’re way in the back and you practiced and practiced and you know your part backwards and forwards and it doesn’t matter. You know you’re going to make a mistake and the conductor’s going to stop the group and embarrass you. It happens every rehearsal. And you get over it.”
Even something as simple-looking as the triangle can be a maddening instrument to perform on. She tells of a professor citing the 10 triangle strikes in a passage of the “William Tell Overture.” All must be played softly and all have to sound the same. “You play one, and you think, OK, that was good, and you try to play another just like it, but it comes out loud. So you go to play the third note and you think, do I play it the same, or like the first one? You think oh, it’s just a triangle. But that’s what’s going on in our heads.”
Once, she was playing crash cymbals next to a friend playing the triangle. Together they had to count 140 rests to play the final notes in a movement, so they agreed to count silently and mouth the numbers to each other. “All of a sudden, we’re mouthing different numbers.” As they watched the color drain from each other’s faces, they scrambled to pick up cues from other players. In the end, they hit their marks.
“If you make a mistake, the whole world knows,” she says. “I’ve had my moments where the criticism was too much and I’ve cried. But you have to strive to get over it. It’s not personal, and it will make your music better.”
The Treasure Coast Percussion Camp runs June 13 through 16. For more information, go to tcpercussioncamp.com. The website, by the way, was entirely redesigned this year by Kosal, and now includes online registration.