On Marv Dahlgren's prodigious output and the purpose of a library

Three bucks to purchase,
hundreds of hours to master.

As I was idly visiting the Really Good Music Publishing site-- the people, you'll recall, who have reissued several out of print Marvin Dahlgren books- an overwhelming amount of material-- checking to see if they had come out with volume 2 of his Variations on Three Camps book, I discovered that they have not released that book yet. Which is fine, because just the first couple of pages of variations have been dominating my pad practice time since I got the book.

No, that volume has not been released yet. Instead, there are a ten or so other new or reissued Dahlgren books: Drum Set Control in 3/4 Time, Drum Set Control in 5/4 Time, Hihat Control, 16th Note Stickings, Triplet Stickings, Setudes (drum set etudes), and on and on. The man is a machine.

Between all of that, his more famous Four Way Coordination, and his slightly-more-familiar Accent On Accents (Vol. 1 and 2)-- all together more than a lifetime's worth of practice materials; in fact very few drummers could claim to have exhausted the possibilities of any one of those books-- you begin to have to confront the question of the point of it all. Why have on hand piles of books if there is virtually no possibility of ever being able to master them? Why buy more books when you haven't completely learned the ones you have? What the hell are we doing?

A few thoughts on those questions after the break: