Vic Firth

Vic Firth (2 June 1930 – 26 July 2015) was an American drummer, percussionist, timpanist, educator, and entrepreneur. He was the principal timpanist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 46 years. He is remembered equally as the founder of Vic Firth Company (formerly Vic Firth, Inc.), a company that makes drumsticks, mallets, brushes, and other percussion gear.

Vic Firth was born as Everett Joseph Firth on June 2, 1930, in Winchester, Massachusetts, to Everett E. Firth and Rosemary Scandura Firth. His father was a well-known trumpet and cornet player and supervisor of music for many years in various schools in Sanford and Wells.

Firth was raised in Sanford, Maine where he attended Sanford High School. Growing up in a musically inclined family, he got his start in music at an early age. He started learning the cornet from his father when he was four years old. Later, he turned to percussion, trombone, clarinet, piano, and music arrangement. He took a theory lesson, a piano lesson, a clarinet lesson, a trombone lesson, and a drum lesson every week. Though he played a bit of everything, he shone in percussions. By the time he was in high school, he was a full-time percussionist and by the age of 16, he created an eighteen-piece band. 

Around that time also, he adopted his alias "Vic" as he believed the sound of "Vic Firth" would fit better in the music business.

Firth had been studying percussion with Salvy Cavicchio in Maine. While still in high school, he began making a six-hour round-trip drive to Boston to study snare drum with George Lawrence Stone and keyboard percussion with Larry White, who was teaching at the New England Conservatory at the time. He would also make biweekly trips down to New York City to study timpani with noted American timpanist Saul Goodman at The Juilliard School.

Firth enrolled with New England Conservatory, Boston, where he studied with Roman Szulc, then timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

During his second year at the Conservatory, Firth received a scholarship to go to the Tanglewood Music Festival in western Massachusetts, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The event inspired him to study and dive deeper into classical music.

Music

When he was twenty years old, Firth auditioned for maestro Arthur Fiedler and joined the Boston Pops Orchestra. One year later, he auditioned for the conductor of the Boston Symphony and was hired as a percussionist by Boston Symphony Orchestra's then music director Charles Munch. (Roman Szulc, who also taught at New England Conservatory, was the timpanist before him). Twenty one years old at the time and still a student at New England Conservatory, Firth was the youngest member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Four years later, he became the principal timpanist for Boston Symphony Orchestra, after jumping from associate principal to assistant principal positions. He remained in that position for almost five decades, until his retirement in 2002.

His teaching career at the New England Conservatory also began before he had graduated — first in the preparatory department, then as head of the percussion department, a position he has held since 1950. Indian conductor Zubin Mehta and Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa once attended his class on percussion techniques for a Copland seminar.

Over the years, Firth worked with numerous musical greats including Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, Colin Davis, Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, and Serge Koussevitzky. 

He cites his favorite musicians as Ludwig van Beethoven, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Johannes Brahms.

Firth retired from Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2002.

Books

Firth wrote several books in his career. In 1963, he published The Solo Timpanist. 

In 1967 and 1968, he authored two books to train snare drummers: Snare Drum Method Book 1 - Elementary and Snare Drum Method Book 2 - Intermediate, respectively. The snare books combined the concepts of orchestral snare drum technique with the 26 NARD Drum rudiments of his time. The elementary book carries an explanation of the basic stroke and playing position and the intermediate book continues with 6/8, 2/4, 4/4, and 3/4 meter as well as an introduction to C, 2/2, 3/8. 9/8, 12/8, and 3/2 meter and deals extensively with grace notes, known in percussion language as flams, drags, and ruffs. In 1968, he published the third and the last of the series on snare drums, The Solo Snare Drummer.

Among his other books are:

• Vic Firth's Rototom Technique: 21 Progressive Etudes – January 1, 1981
• Keyboard Percussion: A comprehensive musical method for individual or group instruction and performance - with Sandy Feldstein 2001
• HPB4 - Hip Pockets: A Guide to Your Percussion Section – May 5, 2001

Vic Firth Company

Frustrated with drumsticks that were warped, uncomfortable, and improperly weighted, Firth began designing and making his own drumsticks in the early 1960s. He felt that to perform his pieces, he needed a higher-quality drumstick than those that were currently being manufactured. He hand-whittled the first sticks himself from bulkier sticks and sent the prototypes to a woodturner in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The two prototypes would become the "SD1 General" and "SD2 Bolero" — the first two models of sticks manufactured by his company. 

Although the sticks were initially intended for his personal use, they gained popularity among his students and were eventually carried by retailers. His first commercial order came from Frank’s Drum Shop in Chicago in a deal he struck when he was touring the city. 

In 1963, he established a small manufacturing operation in his basement. His firm, Vic Firth Company, soon grew into a factory in Kingfield, Maine, that previously had manufactured sleighs. In 1994, he bought his 65,000-square-foot lakeside mill in Newport, Maine.

The business continued to grow and over time, his sticks and mallets have been used by classical musicians around the world and by many famed jazz and rock musicians, including Buddy Rich, Charlie Watts (The Rolling Stones), Anton Fig (of The Late Show with David Letterman), Questlove (The Roots), Chris Fryar (Zac Brown Band), Roger Taylor (Queen), Gary Burton, Jack DeJohnette and drummers for Lou Reed, Elton John, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, Jimmy Buffett, and many others.

The company, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, became one of the world's largest manufacturer of drumsticks and mallets. In December 2010, the company merged with Avedis Zildjian Company, the world’s leading cymbal manufacturer. 

By 2013, the company was offering about 350 products ranging from signature drumsticks to marching mallets to hearing protection. It made over 9 million drumsticks a year. 

On starting the company, Firth recalled in an October 2010 interview with MSNBC:

I had no intentions of getting into a business. It was simply to supply a stick that was better than what was available. But I took it to a different height, that demanded the most sophisticated playing you could do.

[Video] Vic Firth featured on MSNBC - Your Business

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5rqp6lw8ak

Other businesses

Besides running a successful percussion company, Firth also ran an art gallery specializing in American paintings and American clocks and was also a partner in a closed investment partnership.

The Vic Firth Company also had a kitchen division, which produced a line of exquisitely lathed pepper mills, salt grinders, rolling pins, and other high-end culinary tools sold under the "Vic Firth Gourmet." For his gourmet business, his company partnered with celebrity chef Mario Batali to create a signature Mario Batali series. In November 2006, Firth appeared on chef Emeril Lagasse's TV show.

The interests of the gourmet division were eventually sold to Maine Wood Concepts of New Vineyard, Maine in 2012 and re-branded under the name Fletchers' Mill.

• In 1992, Firth was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree by his alma mater New England Conservatory. The award is given to those who have made significant contributions to the world of music. 
• Firth holds honorary doctorates from the University of Southern Maine and the VanderCook College of Music, as well.
• Firth was on the board of directors of the Percussive Arts Society for sixteen years (1984–1991 and 2004–2011).
• From 1987 to 1990, he served at Percussive Arts Society's treasurer.
• He was a member of the PAS Sustaining Member Advisory Council from 1994 through 1999. 
• In 1995, Firth was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame at its convention in Phoenix, Arizona. 
• Firth has been honored with the Modern Drummer Editor's Achievement Award and the Music & Sound Retailer Lifetime Achievement Award.

Firth was married to his wife Olga Kwasniak. The couple had two daughters: Tracy Frith and Kelly DeChristopher.

Firth died pancreatic cancer on July 26, 2015, at his home in Boston, Massachusetts. He was 85.