Experimental percussionist recruits VCU professors to nine-gong orchestra
Musician invites professors to take a hit at his gong
Samantha Foster
Staff Writer
There was standing room only at experimental percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani’s concert this past Saturday at the Ghostprint Gallery.
Nakatani utilizes drums, singing bowls, gongs and sticks to create low-frequency sound waves. The gongs are played with bows, much like a violin, to keep a constant flow of vibrations in the small gallery.
“Don’t worry, it’s not loud. So, if you have a mobile phone or a snack in a plastic bag, it’s going to stand out, and people will look at you,” Nakatani said. “If it was only by sound, you could do it by laptop, but it’s about the vibrations. It’s a very animal-like sound.”
The Nakatani Gong Orchestra played the first set of Nakatani’s concert. Six local participants work with Nakatani to play nine gongs, which themselves took up half the gallery. The participants had rehearsed with Nakatani for only two hours prior to the show, but Nakatani seemed pleased with their performance.
“Some of us had worked with the gongs before we started at 5 p.m., but most of us just rolled up on a gong and started playing,” said Liz Canfield, a gender, sexuality and women’s studies professor at VCU who performed with Nakatami in the Nakatani Gong Orchestra.
Two of the participants are VCU professors, including Canfield and Peter Baldes, a media arts professor.
“Most of us are used to playing with others, but it was helpful to have a community,” Canfield said. “It was wonderful to work with (Nakatani). That’s his vibe.”
In the Nakatani Gong Orchestra, Nakatani provided the sound of the higher frequency gong while acting as a conductor for the others at the same time.
“He’s very simple and clear with instructions, but then he gave us space to do our own thing,” Canfield said.
The second set was Nakatani’s solo performance and was reminiscent of a one-man band. Three 40-inch gongs from the first set stayed, and a snare drum, bass drum, cymbals and roughly 10 singing bowls were added.
The sound was incredibly high-pitched at times, and the performance was a bit like organized chaos, but the audience remained completely silent throughout the show in order to hear everything clearly.
This was the third day of Nakatani’s tour. Last Friday, he performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
“There were about 1,000 people, but I was very nervous about the sound,” Nakatani said. The Ghostprint Gallery was the most natural environment for this type of music since it has wood floors and is a very small space, he said.
Nakatani describes his show as “unpredictable.”
“It’s a very interesting act,” he said. “I play gong good.”
Photos by Amber-Lynn Taber
