That was under the moniker Hits, and we put out an album a few years ago on cassette. Heather Treadway also contributed to the compositions. That music was primarily composed by myself, and Allan Wilson did a lot of the arrangements.
I invited video artists and dancers and it became an offshoot. Instead of doing just Secret Drum Band stuff, we decided to make it a new thing. We got to live there for a month and write new music. Secret Drum Band was invited to do a residency in Joshua Tree, California, on Andrea Zittel’s land at her artist compound. At the same time I was doing this, two of the members of Secret Drum Band, Allan Wilson and Heather Treadway, started another band, called Hits. I composed a whole set of music in 2013 based on the Hawaiian bees. Secret Drum Band has existed since 2006, and in Portland, I started composing more music for it.
This is a little complicated, so I’m glad we get to discuss it. What’s the involvement of the band’s other musicians-Allan Wilson and Heather Treadway-in the songwriting process? That’s when the project came back and since then I’ve been active with it. We toured a 45-minute composition about Mt. It was a different lineup than we have now. In 2010 or 2011, I applied for a grant in Portland to write new music for Secret Drum Band, and I put together a seven-piece ensemble. It was a four-piece at the time, and we only performed for like eight minutes. That was the first Secret Drum Band performance. I think it was 2006 when I proposed an entire showcase of bands with female drummers for Ladyfest Olympia. My music’s always been inspired by soundscapes. So I would listen to sounds in the woods and jot down what I heard to make field recordings. I was doing composition while also doing scientific field work for my master’s degree. It was on my mind for a while, and I was experimenting with composition techniques. I graduated from college in ‘99, but it wasn’t until six or seven years later that I was in a place where I could put Secret Drum Band together. I decided that I eventually wanted to write my own music for percussion. There was timpani, multiple percussion setups, every kind of percussion instrument you could imagine. When I attended college in Binghamton, I was in a university percussion ensemble. I’ve been playing the drums since I was nine. How did the idea for Secret Drum Band come about? It’s a very unique structure. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track We spoke with Schonberg to discuss the history of Secret Drum Band, the intersection of conservation and music, and the joys of orchestrating a five-person drum ensemble. Hood and the Mojave Desert, two places that inform the band’s sense of grandeur. As Schonberg points out, Dynamics also takes inspiration from Mt. The record is avant-garde in a sense, yet the beauty of it comes down to Schonberg, who’s able to transform vast arrangements into something immersive and palatable.ĭynamics plays out like an extended chase scene, with rumbling tom drums and crackling snares. Having spent time fighting for the local bee population to be placed on the endangered species list, the musician used that experience as creative fuel for the band’s debut album, Dynamics. In 2006, Schonberg founded the Secret Drum Band, a percussion quintet that specializes in noise rock. She earned a Master’s Degree in Environmental Studies from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The Staten Island native started playing drums as a child, and eventually moved to the West Coast in 2000 to study ants and conservation biology. Percussionist Lisa Schonberg is passionate about two things: music and environmentalism.