ORONO – The rattle of shekere, the beat of conga drums and a blend of traditional African and newer theatrical music are some of the things children will experience firsthand during a workshop next week at the University of Maine’s Hudson Museum.

The session on drums and songs of the African New World is set for 10 a.m. Thursday, April 19, during vacation week for Maine’s schoolchildren.

Portland percussionist Michael Wingfield, who has shared his passion for the music of Africa and the Caribbean with kids in Maine schools from Fort Kent to Kittery, as well as in several East Coast states, will present the hour-long class, which is for children ages 8 and up.

To Wingfield, who’s made his home in Portland for the past seven years, teaching and performing are all about “passing on the rhythms of our ancestors. My music has journeyed me through the roots of historical culture. I feel that we in the United States and the West owe thanks to those who saved and performed the music and dance idioms.”

During a telephone interview last week, Wingfield said that about two-thirds of his work involves the arts in education. Some traditional instruments Wingfield said he plans to bring to Orono for his workshop are conga drums, shekere (a rattle-like noisemaker) and clave (hardwood sticks used to create the beat arrangement that forms the basis of most Afro-Cuban music).

When Wingfield isn’t working in schools, he directs and performs with either of two groups.

Cabildo, an ensemble that takes its name from a term roughly translated to “town council,” consists of artists from around New England. Wingfield is its director. As history has it, slaves in colonial Caribbean Africa met secretly to relieve the rigors of their toil in the fields through festive song and dance, or Cabildo.

Wingfield also drums with the Bong’bo Society, a Portland drum group that performs West African songs and rhythms. He said that Bong’bo translates to “earth shaking” in the Yoruba language.

Wingfield said his association with African drum and song began as an informal leisure-time passion in his teen-age years in Massachusetts in the 1960s and 1970s, when the nation experienced a resurgence of interest in African-American cultural traditions.

“I came up in an era where to embrace the drum was an expression of the African diaspora in the United States,” Wingfield said.

He eventually connected with African percussionist Pablo Landrum of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he became Landrum’s protege and was allowed to audit music courses.

“That’s how I got drawn in,” he said with a deep chuckle. He said he cut his teeth delivering impromptu workshops in Worcester and Boston, where his aim was to gather crowds in parks and other public spaces on hot summer days.

Class size is limited to 75 children. The cost for the program is $3 per child. For information, call Gretchen Faulkner, museum organizer, at 581-1904.