Matthew Coley

Salyers Percussion | The Matthew Coley Signature Series - Complete Demo Steve Weiss Music had the pleasure of hosting Marimba artist Matthew Coley at our in house studio in Willow Grove, PA, to demonstrate his new series of Marim...

👼🏼🪽🙏🏼 Hello! Here's a bit of a new arrangement of "Amazing Grace" that I'm working on! Available soon through .
I performed it this morning for the lovely parishioners at the First Congregational Church in Waterloo.
And, it was a fantastic way to promote the show at the with the and on April 11, as well as our other activities in the Cedar Valley this April and July! (See 2nd photo.)

*Major news* for the community!
I've located the one and only Marimba Celeste (M.C.), designed by Clair Musser, and built by Deagan in 1929.
Long thought to have been sold for war time scrap metal in the 40s, and lost forever. This sui generis and remarkable creation has survived, but hasn't been seen by anyone other than members of the Miller family in more than 70 years! Musser sold the instrument to the Miller family in 1938. Leroy "Larry" Miller performed with it a handful of times in PA and New York, as seen in the photos. He continued to concertize through his teens and after returning from the war, but primarily used smaller instruments.

I was connected to the Miller family late last year through a serendipitous series of events. As one of the marketing/educational efforts for HM's Musser Marimba Festival in October 2025, I created a marimba history page on my website [ https://www.hearmatthewcoley.com/marimba-history ]. There, I specifically posted David Harvey's article about the M.C., as we were using the colorful promotional image of Musser behind the instrument as key in the branding, and the history of this instrument is just fascinating. Even more so after discovering and viewing it! David has meticulously connected the dots of our history for decades, but there has virtually been no M.C. trail since c.1940.

From my understanding, Megan Miller, the granddaughter of Leroy Miller was playing with her daughter in late October, when her daughter coincidentally said she wanted to play xylophone when she grew up. Megan searched for images of her grandfather with the M.C., and my website popped up! She reached out to me to essentially let it be known that the instrument was still with the family.

I had a lovely video call with Megan and Bob Miller, Leroy's son. And in February, they invited me into a family home to view the instrument. There it was! After 70 some odd years in an attic, assembled once in the 90s, but still in existence. It's hard to articulate what this means to me, David Harvey, and others in the field. I can't report what will be the next chapter for the instrument, but I hope that we get to hear and see it in lights again.