Students hear a message of sound

COSTA MESA — Like most children, Jamilex Peña has experimented with percussion instruments. She occasionally gets to have a turn at her older brother’s drum set, but before she was big enough to wield sticks, she tried common household items.

“I made this little drum out of a plastic cup,” said Jamilex, 9, a fourth-grader at Rea Elementary School. “I put beans inside and hit it with a couple of forks.”

At Rea on Wednesday morning, students learned a great many ways to lay down a beat.

The Sonic Messengers, a musical trio that visits elementary schools around California, hosted a pair of assemblies built around the art of keeping time. Sure enough, the presentation ended with a lesson on how to use cups, cans, buckets and other kitchen items to musical effect.

“Sonic is another word for sound, which makes us the messengers of sound,” said Matt Johnson, who played the snare drum and other instruments throughout the show.

Rea, on Costa Mesa’s Westside, offers band and choir classes for students. On Wednesday, fourth- and fifth-graders got to experience music from another angle, brushing aside melodies altogether and listening to the foundation.

Many percussion instruments may not play melodies, but they can produce a variety of sounds to help color a tune. With a handful of drums, cymbals, claves and a cowbell, the messengers showed how to achieve different effects by striking from different angles or altering the size of an instrument.

Every culture, they noted, brings it own rhythm to the mix. After demonstrating salsa, calypso and other world styles, Johnson noted that America had its own national beat — and it basically descended from the straight tempo of military marches.

“That’s how we feel rock ‘n’ roll and rap in this country,” he said, after listening to students clap along to a song. “We feel it on beats two and four.”