March 26, 2003

Ancient rhythms

Taiko workshop drums up 20 local residents

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer

Leaving footgear and expectations behind, 20 area residents participated Sunday afternoon in a Japanese Taiko Drumming Workshop. The workshop was held in the Milliken Auditorium and conducted by the six-member troupe of the Kiyoshi Nagata Ensemble from Toronto, who the night before had electrified a sold-out crowd with their performance.

Herald photo
Before calling the 20 participants in the Kiyoshi Nagata Ensemble Japanese Drumming Workshop up on stage Sunday afternoon, members of the ensemble give a demonstration of the drumming style, rhythms and techniques at the Milliken Auditorium.

For two hours, these workshop participants - young and old, novice and experienced drummers - practiced the form, techniques and rhythms of ancient Japanese drummers. The ensemble began the workshop by playing an unrehearsed piece that demonstrated the art form before inviting participants on stage to choose a taiko, which means drum in Japanese.
Ensemble founder and leader Kiyoshi Nagata then led everyone through a series of stretching exercises, akin to a martial arts routine. He next described and demonstrated the basic body posture and arm strokes of taiko drumming. He also coached students on the proper way to hold drumsticks, called buchi, and the importance of balancing strikes made with the right and left hands.
As in all things associated with the Japanese culture, taiko includes a number of elegant rituals. Nagata showed workshop participants the moves to both begin and end a song and noted the opening line said in Japanese with a bow: 'I beg you to start.'
"The whole idea of taiko is to make something that is very difficult look easy and graceful," said Nagata, who has studied in Japan with master drummers. "The most important thing to playing taiko is to be very flexible and relaxed."
Nagata, who is a member of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, also emphasized the importance of drumming from the heart.
"It is secondary to be rhythmically good, it is more important to put your spirit into it, to play with full body and full mind," he said.
Nagata said his group wears traditional Japanese workman's clothing, in honor of taiko's roots. He noted that having bare feet or wearing Japanese slippers is key to taiko drumming.
"You are barefoot so you can feel the vibrations in your feet," said Nagata, who writes many of the ensemble's original compositions. "There is a relationship of the drum to the earth to the body and it goes in a circle."
Sherry McNamara of Traverse City attended the workshop with her husband, Ed. Both bought tickets early to Saturday night's concert and were so eager to learn more about taiko drumming that they were the first to enroll in the workshop. McNamara noticed a number of similarities in taiko mental and physical postures to her previous studies in martial arts.
"These drums are pretty cool, I think the sound and rhythms are very primitive," McNamara noted. "It is easy to learn but kind of challenging, my arm muscles are very shaky."
"Attending the workshop kind of made us appreciate what we saw last night and how hard it was," she said.
Nagata also described for workshop participants the history and use of the various taiko instruments, which range from drums of all sizes and makes to gongs, flute, bells and clappers. He also discussed the history of the art form, which dates back 2,000 years.
For millennia, most Japanese villages owned at least one taiko drum, lovingly preserved and played only on important occasions. The villagers used the drum in celebrations or to mark the boundaries of villages, basically as far as the reverberations can be heard.
Taiko drumming was also incorporated into religious ceremonies to exhort the many Shinto gods to look favorably on a village or to bless a harvest. Villagers believed that the booming noise of the taiko drums allowed them to communicate with these gods.
In the 1500s, Taiko rhythms were used to boost the morale of troops in military campaigns and to scare away enemies.
The modern incarnation of taiko drumming, where groups of drummers will compose and perform tunes, dates back 50 years. Taiko almost got lost in the post World War II effort to modernize Japan, Nagata said. However, a revival over the past 40-50 years saved the art form.
"In every village in Japan there is a different style of playing drums," said Nagata, who apprenticed for a year with the renown Kodo Drummers of Japan. "It is quite diverse. Taiko has long been a symbol of the community and the Japanese spirit."
Despite its modern revival, taiko maintains a largely oral tradition. Drummers memorize songs and only rarely is the music written down, with many songs evolving over time. Nagata said that he and his ensemble have committed many songs to memory and continue to add new compositions to their repertoire.
"Our longest concert was two and a half hours and we were surprised that we had that much memorized," he said.