Leigh Howard Stevens - Performance

Performance

Stevens' performance at the first PASIC (Percussive Arts Society International Convention) in Rochester, New York in 1976 was a seminal event for all in attendance. For the first time, many percussion performers and teachers were seeing someone performing with a quasi-Musser grip but with an unprecedented degree of flexibility. Stevens was not attempting to revolutionize the percussion world; rather, he was merely performing in what he thought was a natural method for the marimba.

It would be difficult to overstate how different the attitudes and assumptions about four-mallet marimba playing were at the time that MOM was written. Since I had been doing an independent roll from the moment I began playing xylophone in 1969, I personally had no appreciation of how "revolutionary" the technique was, but as late as 1976, when I performed at the first Percussive Arts Society International Convention, most percussionists were seeing the independent roll, my "vertical Musser grip", rotary-based strokes and my extended-length birch handles for the first time.

— Leigh Howard Stevens, Method of Movement for Marimba

LHS continues to be an active performer and clinician worldwide and has appeared at a dozen Percussive Arts Society International Conventions (PASIC) since 1976, and served as Professor of Marimba at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England from 1997-2004. From 1980 to the present, he has held a three-week Summer Marimba Seminar in Ocean Grove, NJ where an average of 30 students from around the world come participate in an intensive study of music and the Stevens’ technique with LHS himself.

On November 10, 2006, Stevens was officially inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame during the 2006 PASIC in Austin, Texas. Also, LHS is an alumnus of Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. and was recently inducted into the school's Hall of Fame.