Ouachita Stories

Students from Ouachita Baptist University’s Percussion Studio along with Dr. Ryan Lewis, assistant professor of percussion, participated in the Arkansas Earth Day Festival at Riverfront Park with a "Music with Found Instruments" booth.

“I try to find community service opportunities for our percussion students each fall and spring,” Lewis said, “and there could not be a better way for our students to share our gifts and abilities to benefit the community than to play music.”

Instead of bringing drums, cymbals, marimbas and xylophones, the percussion students collected recyclable materials and took them to Riverfront Park. Trey Gosser, Ian Olmstead and Jonathan Waddell constructed their own individual set-ups using buckets, jugs, bottles, boxes, jars and scraps of metal and proceeded to have a five-hour jam session.

“The rest of the materials and some drumsticks we set out in front of us and we encouraged people walking by to find an instrument from the pile and join in the jam session,” Lewis said. “We also set up a table and helped children make maracas out of soda cans, beans and rice that they could take home.”

“All of the kids participating loved it,” said Gosser, a sophomore music major from North Little Rock, Ark. “They kept making tons of shakers with cans and playing with us.”

“The students and I had a blast exploring sounds from recyclable materials, putting together set-ups and improvising on some of our favorite percussion rhythms from popular and world music,” Lewis said.

“The best part was seeing the amazement and then enjoyment in the faces of people that stopped to watch and listen,” Lewis noted. “One of the Earth Day volunteers told me, ‘I can't believe you can make music like that with trash and junk!’ As an educator, it is always enjoyable to expand someone's concept of what is music and what is not or what is a musical instrument and what is not.”

“This opportunity taught me just how musical trash can be,” Gosser added.

For more information, contact Dr. Ryan Lewis at [email protected] or (870) 245-5421.

By Meg Gosser