Nakatani Gong Orchestra + SHHH!! Ensemble
October, 23, 2023
Doors: 7:30 PM
Show: 8 PM
Location: Grotto
In many ways, percussion is so simple. When an audience witnesses a drummer, they’re tapping into an intuition that creates a relationship, marrying sound with choreography. The stick (or finger, hand, implement) comes up – and then down to strike the instrument, activating its resonance. This phenomenon makes the music tangible, allowing an audience to not just witness the action but to believe in the results of the sound, perhaps even inviting their ears and mind to open up to an instrument’s rich spectrum of color. This invitation to an instrument’s nature not only makes percussion-artists exceptionally resourceful and collaborative, but more often than not, practitioners of improvisation and creators rooted in the DIY spirit. New Works Calgary, Contemporary Calgary, Bug Incision, and Sound Atlas Festival are thrilled to be presenting an evening of stunning percussion performance in an eclectic double bill between the Ottawa-based SHHH!! Ensemble, and the legendary nomadic percussion-sound-artist Tatsuya Nakatani, presenting his traveling Nakatani Gong Orchestra.
Comprised of percussionist Zac Pulak and pianist Edana Higham the SHHH!! Ensemble have carved a space in modern chamber music, fiercely supportive of a growing body of Canadian composers, particularly women writing notated music. Having premiered works by Kelly-Marie Murphy, Noora Nakhaei, Monica Pearce, and the late Jocelyn Morlock, SHHH!! is not showing any sign of delay in their work’s expansion. The duo’s debut album Meanwhile (Analekta) was released in October 2022 to critical acclaim, reaching top positions on Apple Music and Spotify playlists, as well as being nominated for Classical Recording of the Year at the 2023 East Coast Music Awards. The title track, Meanwhile, was the first piece written for SHHH!! by composer John Beckwith. Currently, SHHH!! Ensemble is preparing to record their second album, a large-scale commissioned work by Frank Horvat entitled An Auditory Survey of the Last Days of the Holocene, to be released in the fall of 2023 on the Leaf Music label. For their performance in Calgary, the duo will present commissions by Jocelyn Morlock, Monica Pearce, Harry Stafylakis, and Mari Alice Conrad, in addition to an improvised set with Tatsuya Nakatani.
No stranger to the scene in YYC, Tatsuya Nakatani makes his return to Calgary to present his Nakatani Gong Orchestra for the first time in the city. Having been internationally active since the 1990’s, Tatsuya Nakatani has produced over 80 recordings, with extensive tours and over 150 concerts a year. Tatsuya’s work represents the epitome of the Do-It-Yourself artist as he is not only his own record producer and engineer, but auto-mechanic, tour manager, and visual artist, having lived in his built-out van over countless tours where his vast collection of instruments, kitchen, and living quarters travel with him, keeping his work nomadic and courageously independent.
Nakatani’s sound practice has adopted various instruments of not only struck, but bowed nature, centers around his use of the wind gong as an expressive tool for building layers of complex vibration, ethereal melodies, and dramatic pacing of texture. Made up of sixteen Calgary locals with Nakatani as conductor and sculptor, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra’s performance will be a momentous occasion, featuring Nakatani’s own compositions in a richly immersive sound world rarely experienced. The various players will be using hand-carved Kobo-bows Nakatani crafts himself, commanding the instruments to his intentions as a ground-up independent artist, while rooted in community building and collaboration through this unique sound-art experience.
–Chris Sies
About the Performers
Nakatani Gong Orchestra
The NAKATANI GONG ORCHESTRA - NGO - is a large ensemble touring contemporary sound art project. Local musicians are trained in Nakatani’s technique for playing his adapted bowed Gong, and he conducts them in a performance of his original composition. In the last decade, the NGO has performed hundreds of concerts involving thousands of participants around the world in the creation of these transformative sound works.
For each unique performance, participating NGO players (musicians) are selected by a local presenter. Nakatani gives a specialized rehearsal to the players in preparation for the performance. There is no expectation of previous experience playing a gong. Nakatani instructs the players in his unique techniques for bowing the gong and following his method of conducting. It is important to note that this project is not a traditional music program or traditional Japanese music, it is a contemporary sound art project.
Nakatani’s adaption of the Chinese wind gong to respond to his percussive bowing technique in his solo work (c. 1995) led to the inclusion of other players trained in his methods to realize his compositions. The Kobo bows, mallets, and surrounding instrumentation equipment have all been developed and are hand crafted by Tatsuya Nakatani. After ten years of planning and preparation, the NGO began touring in 2011 with four adapted gongs and has grown to 17 gongs today (January 2019). It is the only bowed gong orchestra in the world.
Tatsuya Nakatani is an avant-garde percussionist, composer, and artist of sound. Active internationally since the 1990s, Nakatani has released over 80 recordings and tours extensively, performing over 150 concerts a year. His primary focus is his solo work and his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. He teaches master classes and lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world. Originally from Japan, he makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. With his activity in new music, improvisation, and experimental music, Nakatani has a long history of collaboration.
Nakatani's distinctive music centred around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his personally hand-carved Kobo Bows, he has spent decades refining and developing his sound as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music.
SHHH!! Ensemble
Percussionist Zac Pulak and pianist Edana Higham are the two members of SHHH!! Ensemble, a duo carving a space for themselves as electrifying performers of new music. With a keen ear for experimentation and exploration, SHHH!! has been deemed “truly virtuosic and intense” by Toronto’s Confluence Concerts and called “a beautiful discovery” following their debut with the Société de Musique contemporaine du Québec.
Formed in 2017, SHHH!! Ensemble began developing their signature “avant-accessible” style through residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Canadian Music Centre. Since then, SHHH!! has continued to develop innovative repertoire for their ensemble by commissioning and premiering new works by Kelly-Marie Murphy, John Beckwith, Frank Horvat, Jocelyn Morlock, Noora Nakhaei, and Monica Pearce, among many others.
SHHH!! Ensemble’s provocative “Spirits” program, which premiered in January 2020 at the Canadian Music Centre, has since toured at concert series and festivals across Canada, including the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, LUMINA, Ottawa Chamberfest, and the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec’s Montreal New Music Festival. Featuring music by J.S. Bach, Andy Akiho, Jocelyn Morlock, Monica Pearce, Micheline Roi, and others, “Spirits” is a journey through composers’ reflections on the nature of creativity, meditation, Scotch whisky, and The Beyond.
SHHH!! Ensemble’s creativity and vitality were especially notable through the pandemic with one critic commenting “This virtuoso duo are so agile and inventive… I doubt anything short of a geological cataclysm will shut them down” (The WholeNote). 2020-2022 saw major highlights such as the duo’s acceptance into the prestigious Evolution: Classical career development residency at the Banff Centre, a National Arts Centre #CanadaPerforms concert, the world-premiere of JUNO-winning composer Jocelyn Morlock’s Spirit Gradient with the Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival in Newfoundland, and a nationally broadcast recital on the CBC Radio 2 program “In Concert”.
In February 2023 SHHH!! Ensemble “enthralled” (Winnipeg Free Press) in their debut as soloists in the world premiere of Kelly-Marie Murphy’s concerto Machines, Mannequins, and Monsters with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. A repeat performance of that concerto the following week with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra was met with a standing ovation.
As Co-Artistic Directors of the Ottawa New Music Creators, Zac and Edana take pride in their role as presenters of weird and wonderful new sounds in the National Capital Region, curating programs known for cutting-edge invention drawing from local and international artists.
SHHH!! Ensemble’s debut album Meanwhile (Analekta) was released in October 2022 to critical acclaim, reaching top positions on Apple Music and Spotify playlists, as well as being nominated for Classical Recording of the Year at the 2023 East Coast Music Awards. The title track, Meanwhile, was the first piece written for SHHH!! by composer John Beckwith.
Currently, SHHH!! Ensemble is preparing to record their second album, a large-scale commissioned work by Frank Horvat entitled An Auditory Survey of the Last Days of the Holocene, to be released in the fall of 2023 on the Leaf Music label.
