This Fall the music department at Northern Essex is getting into the swing of things with their annual Boomwhackers event, one of the many school functions looking to put the ‘community’ back into Community College.
In the Tech Center on Oct, 3 music department faculty Alisa Bucchiere and Abe Finch stood eagerly around a large circle of orange 5-gallon buckets passing out drum sticks to students as they filed in getting ready to participate in a rhythmic extravaganza.
Finch led the drum circle portion of the event commanding an impressively cohesive call and response type activity as the group pounded away at a medium tempo Samba.
Between activities Finch expressed the value of nonverbal communication in the drum circle event stating, “everybody’s equal and listening to each other — it’s a together event it’s not a showcase on anybody — that is probably the gist of the whole thing.”
“I liked it,” said Brianna Bardales, a first-year liberal arts major studying music therapy at NECC. “It’s like very stress relieving, because you know, I work full time and go to school so obviously it’s so hard to balance both, so coming here to just like play the drums even though I don’t know how to play the drums, it was really nice to … let a little stress out.”
Bardales’ sentiments are empirically reflected by many scientific studies, including one by the National Institute of Health whose research found statistical evidence of a reduction in stress and anxiety in patients involved in drum circles.
“This is a lot of fun, little bit of a workout,” said Sean Gaff an NECC music major emphasizing the benefits of exercise involved in such an event.
“Hopefully people find out that we do fun stuff like bang on buckets and get together and have fun and build community, more community at the community college. That’s what it is man, in a nutshell, get people together.”
– Professor Abe Finch
As the students rocked on participants were asked to seize hold of a musical device known as a boomwhacker, a colorful plastic tube that can variate in size and pitch, and were instructed to play along to a whimsical arrangement of songs such as Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Ghostbusters, cued note for note by a karaoke-like play along tutorial up on a projector.
It was reminiscent of a more childlike activity you would have been familiar with in kindergarten or primary school but took a higher degree of attention to focus on playing the right notes at the right times as everyone had a boomwhacker that was tuned to a different pitch.
Although the second portion of this events communal revelry had a more childlike essence to it than the drum circle you could feel an effort in the organization of the event and its participants to create a space where people felt free to express themselves and have fun, an attribute not only foundational to children but adults as well.
The event was seemingly a success for all those that attended but Finch expressed a need to expand these events and their communal impacts to a broader portion of the student body.
Most of the people in attendance did have some affiliation with the music department and Finch expressed he was “not sure that the advertising gets out generally very early” further stating that “there’s tons of music events and they’re all open to the public, (it’s) community college but like it’s commuter college, it’s hard to get a community when everybody just comes on campus to take their class and then they drive home, but its name is community college because it’s in your community but like where’s your community?”
Finch makes a point. Student and staff all share the same facilities and resources but there can be a tendency to overlook the importance of what truly connects us at a core level in these shared spaces. Each other.
“Hopefully people find out that we do fun stuff like bang on buckets and get together and have fun and build community” said Finch, “more community at the community college. That’s what it is man, in a nutshell, get people together.”
