Steel Drums Along the Wissahickon: Ruffy & Kyle building bridges between people & planet
- Thomas Tittmann
- Apr 8
- 9 min read
RUFFY
Introducing these Pennsylvania change makers who have fashioned their careers around building bridges of connection…
Ruffian Tittmann is the daughter of my younger brother Peter and his wife Allys. She’s used her creativity in the Pennsylvania outdoor parks making them more accessible...
Kyle Dunleavy, partner to Ruffy, and operates a business manufacturing steel drum instruments for individuals and groups like educational institutions and bands.
FYI - Post's title is a takeoff on the book and film "Drums Along the Mohawk."
Wissahickon
Lenape tribe origins: "The valley, avenue and creek all take their name from “wisameckham,” meaning “catfish stream.” - Philadelphia Magazine
Building Bridges...
Ruffy has overseen the re-building of foot bridges in parks, helping the community and those she in the organization...go further.
[from the article linked below] Seeing a project through was one of the greatest things for me,” said Ruffian. “Whether it was the Forbidden Drive collapses and seeing those restored, the parkwide signage project, various trail projects, the ultimate was the [Lida Way] bridge. It was amazing. That day, December 10, standing on it [at the ribbon cutting], I don’t know that I’ve had a such a great feeling of satisfaction ever professionally.
A bike ride leads to a career path...
[from the article linked below] It’s special to know that Ruffian’s fantastic journey at FOW was as serendipitous as a longer-than-usual bike ride on an unfamiliar path, where she stumbled upon the park that would be the backdrop for her life for the next 18 years.
“I had been living over in the art museum area, and Kyle and I took a bike ride one day up Kelly Drive and onto the bike trail and somehow ended up in the woods,” said Ruffian. “When we made it to Lincoln Drive, it had felt like maybe we had ridden much further than we thought to be because all of a sudden you couldn’t see the city anymore, and there are all these trees.”
She recalled finding her way to the Wissahickon when she stumbled upon the job posting for development director that year.
A woman who helped lead others into the woods...
[from the article linked below] We are thankful for our female leaders every month, and this Women’s History Month, we’re proud to recognize Ruffian and to have had her as a collaborator, leader, and role model at FOW all these years."
[from the linked article below] In 2006, Ruffian Tittmann was working as the director of membership and annual giving at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) when she went on a "longer than expected" bike ride up Kelly Drive. She came across the Wissahickon Valley Park.
Thus, when she saw a job listing for a development director at Friends of the Wissahickon (FOW) that same year, Tittmann had to apply. Her love for the park she happened upon in 2006 would go on to define the next 19 years of her life. "I don't want to get choked up, but I could go on," said Tittmann in an interview with the Local. "It's been almost 20 years…it's been a dream job for sure."
Now, after working at FOW for almost two decades (the last five of which were as executive director), Tittmann is ready for a new adventure.
KYLE
Kyle's world of music also contains "bridges"...
[from the linked article below] Music, in its countless forms and genres, is a universal language that speaks to our emotions. It’s an art form that’s meticulously crafted, with each piece serving a specific role in the overall composition.
A song is much like a story, with its verses, chorus, intro, and outro each playing a part in shaping the narrative. One such integral piece of this musical puzzle is the ‘bridge’.
The bridge in music, often overlooked but undeniably significant, serves as a crucial link within a song. It’s a breath of fresh air that adds contrast and complexity to a composition, taking the listener on a detour before bringing them back to familiar territory.
KUDOS: DRUM ROLL PLEASE...
Here's look at this Grammy winner Kyle has built for:
[from the article linked below][ A member of the acclaimed ensemble Sō Percussion since 2006, Josh has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Lincoln Center Festival, Stanford Lively Arts, and dozens of other venues in the United States. In that time, Sō Percussion has toured Russia, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, and Scotland. He has had the opportunity to work closely with Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Paul Lansky, David Lang, Matmos, Dan Deacon, and many others.
(His) parallel interests led Josh to break ground in the use of the steel drums in contemporary classical music. To date, he has commissioned over a dozen pieces for steel drums from composers such as Stuart Saunders Smith, Roger Zahab, Dan Trueman, and Paul Lansky. In 2010, Steven Mackey’s quartet It Is Time – commissioned for Sō Percussion by Carnegie Hall and Chamber Music America – featured Josh on a new microtonal lead pan in its Carnegie Hall premiere, receiving rave reviews in the New York Times. He’s also had the honor to drill the Brooklyn Steel Orchestra (New York) and Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra (Trinidad) for conferences in steel pan and the Panorama competition during carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.
Kyle and Josh "pan-handling" together on drums and stage in 2014...
This next article was linked with the above video.
[from the article linked below] There is very little that When Steel Talks can say about NYU Steel that we haven’t already said over the years since its inception in 2007 - except maybe, mission accomplished.
Born out of the vision of NYU percussion department chairman Professor Jonathan Haas and realized under the directorship of Josh Quillen, NYU Steel has begun to achieve its full potential. After all, steelpan music performance studies is mandatory for all New York University percussion majors at the respected Music and Performing Arts Professions Program in Percussion Studies. Couple that with the fact that NYU is located in the backyard of some of the largest and best steel orchestras outside of Trinidad and Tobago, the originator of the steelpan family of instruments.
Let's listen...
--"Kyle Dunleavy required two years, a back-yard bonfire, and many hot-tub soaks (to soothe his aching deltoids) to hammer out an instrument with an unprecedented range of notes.) If the infamous "Subscription Wall" blocks access, I've included the text at the end of this post.
A.K.A. Published in the print edition of The New Yorker's December 20, 2021, issue, with the headline “Hot Tub Drum Machine.” Included this cool down-home image...
Look at this next beauty...Imagine at 40' version in a spotlight hanging over a stage at a rock concert experience...
“There’s a Grateful Dead song for every occasion”- so says friend Steve Bermont
From this "GRATE" music maker's description of his piece. Check out his site...lots of rockin' covers...Here's his comments for this video:
109 views Jul 11, 2024
I saw "Franklin's Tower" performed by Dead and Company in 2021 in Philly. A rainbow appeared over the whole stadium when they played it. Needless to say it was amazing and it's been a staple in my repertoire ever since. For booking information please visit my website at: https://mikedettra.com/
Jerry played steel drums on friend of the devil...
In "DRUMS" at around 52:00 Jerry puts down his guitar, picks up sticks...and after a few minutes, picks up a steel drum and joins regular drummers Mickey and Billy in keepin' and sharin' the beat...That's Jerry on right side with stick in the the air...
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How an Impossible Steel Drum Gets Built
Five years ago, Josh Quillen, a member of Sō Percussion, a Brooklyn-based music ensemble, spoke with a maker and tuner of steel drums named Kyle Dunleavy about building a potentially unworkable design. Musical steel drums, also called pans, are fashioned from industrial barrels of the type used for storing crude oil or hazardous waste. Pans come in a variety of different voices—bass, tenor bass, cello, guitar, double second, double tenor, and tenor. “I wanted a pair of double seconds that would have at least three octaves of notes on them,” Quillen said recently. “The drums would be fully chromatic, with all the sharps and flats, and would go down to the C below middle C.” No drums like them, with such a plenitude of notes, were then in existence. “That would require about a square foot of extra room on the drums, so Kyle would have to rearrange all of the notes to get them to fit. I was asking him to climb Mt. Everest.”
Dunleavy, who works out of his garage in the Philadelphia suburbs, began the project in 2017 and spent two years seeming to get nowhere. Then, suddenly, Quillen received a call saying that the drums were ready. On a rainy night near Christmas, 2019, Quillen, a soft-spoken man with a robust beard, Moscot eyeglasses, and a laid-back gravitas, knocked on Dunleavy’s garage door. He was accompanied by Kendall K. Williams, a doctoral student in music composition at Princeton. The door rattled upward, revealing Dunleavy—tall, restless, with light-blue eyes and tendony hands.
“Let’s see those bad boys,” Quillen said. Dunleavy’s garage was outfitted with a workbench, a tool chest, an air compressor, a stand-alone hot tub, and an array of empty steel industrial barrels stacked on their ends. On a stand inside a tuning chamber—a small room lined with sound-muffling carpet—sat Quillen’s finished drums. Each was twenty-eight inches across and plated entirely in chrome. Their shining heads were concave, like pasta bowls. Inside, the drums’ notes were bubbles of different sizes and shapes swelling outward. The metal gleamed with irregularities. Steel drummers claim that no two pans sound exactly alike.
Bottom of Form
Dunleavy took up a pair of mallets and struck the largest bubble. A resonant moong filled the chamber. “That is the low C,” he said. He handed the mallets to Quillen.
Quillen tested the low C, moong, moong, then struck a smaller bubble and got a higher note—mung. “That’s middle C,” he said. Then he sharply hit a small bubble and a tiny bubble—ming, ping!—high C and C-sharp an octave higher. “My goodness, you got four C’s onto these drums. It’s kind of massive.” Quillen floated the mallets over many notes—mung ping-pong in loon and moon sang on a dumb tomb. “There’s a warmth and darkness in this sound,” he said as he malleted around.
“They sound like an organ,” Williams added.
Dunleavy said that he’d spent two years imagining different layouts of notes, trying to hear them in his mind. It was a complex problem, because every note on a steel drum interacts with its neighbors. Finally, he rolled a new eighty-five-gallon barrel into his tuning chamber and spent several hours beating the bottom with a short-handled sledgehammer. “I was sinking the pan down, just going for depth and looking for a shape,” he said. “Then I started smoothing the pan with smaller hammers. That’s when I started hearing the notes.” But, he went on, “the notes weren’t alive yet.” Using a power tool called a metal nibbler, he nibbled the barrel down to the drumhead, which he placed in a back-yard bonfire until it turned iridescent blue.
After the drum cooled, Dunleavy said, he refined the notes, hitting the steel with an assortment of small hammers while he watched waveforms pulse on the display screen of a strobe tuner. He flipped the drum over frequently, hitting the bubbles alternately from the top and from the bottom: “ ‘I’m gonna get that note,’ you say to yourself.” Once in a while, Dunleavy climbed into the hot tub and soaked his aching deltoids. (“The hot tub is my secret weapon,” he explained.) It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels.
In the chamber, Quillen ran the mallets over the drums in a blur, releasing linns of notes. “What comes to mind is a teardrop sound,” he said as he played. “The note is really bright at first, and then there’s a decay, a spreading out and a softening. The sound is dark, but there’s a point to it. I always liked the sound of the harp.” He played sweeping, harplike arpeggios. He improvised until a melody formed. The notes—sweet, complex, loamy in timbre, and fully alive—seemed to take on the quality of a human voice, and it was singing “What a Wonderful World.”
Weeks afterward, COVID arrived. Sō Percussion stopped doing in-person concerts. It wasn’t until last weekend, when a pan musician named Marc Brooks played them at a Sō Percussion concert at Carnegie Hall, that a live audience finally heard Dunleavy’s impossible drums. ♦
#music #humor #bridges #RuffianTittmann #KyleDunleavy #Pennsylvania #parks #SteelDrums #FriendsOfWissahickon #JohnMuir #SoPercussion #Grammy #JoshQuillen #HotelCalifornia #TheEagles #GratefulDead #MikeDettra #SteveBermont #Brooklyn #NYUSteel #CrossfireSteelOrchestra #JerryGarcia #MickeyHart #BillKreutzmann
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