Faculty

Four time Grammy award winner, Glen Velez is the founding Father of the modern frame drum movement and is regarded as a legendary figure among musicians and audiences world-wide. Velez brought a new genre of drumming to the contemporary music scene by creating his own performance style inspired by years of percussion and frame drumming studies from various cultures. Velez’s virtuosic combinations of hand movements, finger techniques, along with his original compositional style, which incorporates stepping, drum language and Central Asian Overtone singing (split-tone singing), has undoubtedly opened new possibilities for musicians around the globe, resulting in a shift in modern percussion.

Velez developed his own teaching approach called The Handance Method. It incorporates voice and body movement into the process of learning to play the frame drum and has been presented in dozens of universities and conservatories. Velez is an adjunct professor at Mannes School of Music in New York City and conducts regular master classes at The Juilliard School and Tanglewood Summer Music Program. Glen’s groundbreaking research efforts into the history of the frame drum has inspired a host of his protégé to continue the quest into the mystery of the frame drum’s origins.