Stroll through East Ridge Elementary School in Coralville after hours some weekday and you’ll hear the warm, mellow, resonant tones of marimba music wafting down the hallways.
In its music room, you’ll find two dozen or so fourth and fifth-graders, each happily pounding away with mallets on the polished wooden bars of these unique and extraordinary xylophone-like instruments.
The kids are warming up, but the cacophony of sound ends abruptly as Clear Creek Amana elementary music instructor Paul Corbiere steps to the center of the room. He lifts two seed-filled gourds similar to maracas, called “hoshos,” and begins shaking them to set the beat.
Soon, the students are deep into one of their favorite marimba songs, lost in the lively rhythm and harmonies of an instrument that some believe dates back 5,000 years to Asia and Africa.
“It’s the coolest thing on campus, according to the elementary kids,” Corbiere told me. His younger students claim to love the shocked look on their friends’ faces when they see and hear the unique band in a lively performance.
Clear Creek Amana marimba students are enthusiastic learners
About half of the marimbas are owned by the Clear Creek Amana school district, and the rest by Corbiere, who actually built one from scratch. He teaches and directs four different marimba bands each week – two elementary, one middle school and one school staff band.
He started marimba bands while teaching at Columbus Junction 20 years ago, then brought the fun to the Clear Creek-Amana district 12 years ago.
“I guess I just love leading the marimba groups and working with the kids and watching them grow,” the 61-year-old said. “I’m not retiring yet. This keeps me out of trouble and from spending money.”
Corbiere points out that the marimba’s bars are arranged somewhat like piano keys. Resonator tubes underneath the bars amplify the sound, typically covering four to five octaves.
But unlike other instruments, the performers memorize the songs and do not use sheet music.Kids start out learning eight-beat songs, then advance to 16-beat songs and so on through repetition.
“My middle school group is learning a very long piece,” he said. “It’s all memorized and they are nailing it! The amazing thing is not the part itself – it’s the playing of the song together. They are great.”
Building character and confidence at CCA with Marimba music
As you might expect from a lifelong teacher, Corbiere has long focused more on what kids can get from the music than what it sounds like.
When first teaching in Florida, he and the school guidance counselor started a “Beat for Peace” program in which kids who had trouble with truancy, behavioral issues – even gang involvement – found an incentive to do better through his drumming classes. Corbiere worked with a similar program with marimbas at Columbus Junction.
“We viewed it as an intervention,” he said. “It improved self-esteem in kids and some were able to transfer the skills they learned through music to their regular classroom.”
At Clear Creek-Amana, the marimba program is different − simply an after-school project open to all. The elementary marimba kids who advance to the middle school group are hooked on the instrument and ready to take “a leadership roll,” Corbiere said. This “roll” in the marimba world is when you can master the art of hitting a bar with dual mallets fast enough to sustain a note while playing the melody.
Corbiere is openly proud to have about a half dozen middle school kids who play these rolls together in his band. When I noted that sometimes the wooden bars jump up when struck by a mallet, he replied “that means they hit it the right way.”
The middle school marimba band holds an annual one-day concert tour, traveling to four school buildings within the district, this year on May 21. The event involves borrowing the high school marching band’s equipment truck and carefully loading and unloading about 24 marimbas throughout the day – which Corbiere said is another teaching opportunity.
“There is also an art to the non-playing part of performing,” he said. “They learn that nobody plays until we are all set up.”
Percussion is in CCA band instructor’s blood
Corbiere is the guru of marimba around the CCA district and well known elsewhere in the elementary percussion world. A Florida native with a master’s degree from Ohio State, he’s been teaching elementary music for 34 years.
He writes music for marimbas and other percussion instruments, and has a catalog of his published music for recorders. He spends his summers leading weekly workshops throughout several states through the World Music Drumming curriculum.
Corbiere said his first love is probably percussion, but he also plays guitar, ukulele, and the bowed psaltery, a steel-wire-strung instrument played with a bow, which he said “can be very irritating to some people.” He is also learning to play a hammered dulcimer.
“I just play stuff – a Jack of all trades and master of none,” he joked. “I’ll play a galvanized pipe if you need it.”
Want to hear the CCA marimba bands?
All three student marimba bands will perform at the CCA Monster Band Concerts on May 19 at the CCA High School cafeteria. The concerts are free, with the marimba bands scheduled for 5:15 p.m. (elementary) and 6:45 p.m. (middle school).
Richard Hakes is a longtime columnist for the Iowa City Press-Citizen.
This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Clear Creek Amana marimba guru has four bands pounding proud
Reporting by Richard Hakes, Iowa City Press-Citizen / Ames Tribune
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