(Nakatani Gong Orchestra at Powell Street Festival, Vancouver. Photo courtesy of Tatsuya Nakatani.)

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 centered 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.

The musicians for this edition of the Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra will be:

Geneviève Ackerman
Miel Azevedo
Annabelle Chouinard
Oscar Coyoli
Marilou Craft
Susanna Hood
Atsushi Ikeda
Chloe Jackson-Reynolds
Pablo Jimenez
Jean Néant aka Joni Void
Shota Nakamura
Roxanne Nesbitt
Fahmid Nibesh
Élise Paradis
Christelle Saint-Julien
Tahlia Stacey

(photo courtesy of the artist)

ARTS CARE is an interactive sound installation by interdisciplinary artist Jesse Stewart that will be on display in the lobby of the Sala Rossa during this concert. Aluminum letter-gongs that spell the words “ARTS” and “CARE” are activated by the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI), originally conceived by American composer, improviser, and humanitarian Pauline Oliveros. Visitors are invited to engage with the work by moving within the field of view of an AUMI-equipped iPad that detects motion and converts it into electrical impulses that are sent to mechanical strikers that will play the letter-gongs in response to visitors’ movements.

Co-presented with Arts in the Margins, Mardi Spaghetti, CNMN/RCN, CJLO and CKUT

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Innovations en concert would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the SOCAN Foundation for their support.