[upbeat music]

Hello, everyone.

My name is Torrence Button Jr., and I am a first-year post-grad student at New England Conservatory of Music, and I'm here to talk about some positives and negatives of being an orchestral percussionist.

So I have three positives and three negatives, and let's talk about the positives first.

First, which is why I love it, is that we get to perform and study incredible music by amazing composers.

I think that this type of music, it dates all the way back to the beginning of time, and honestly, it's like being transported to whatever time period we're playing.

So if we're doing a Beethoven piece, I feel like I'm getting transported back in how they performed music back in that time period and the style and everything like that on timpani, all the way to new music, where there's lots of different instruments that we play, weird, quirky things, and it's like being able to just do all those things.