ArtSPEAK@FSW Concert: Tatsuya Nakatani & The Nakatani Gong Orchestra to perform at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW
Florida Southwestern State College will present internationally-acclaimed avant-garde percussionist, composer and sound artist, Tatsuya Nakatani & The Nakatani Gong Orchestra for a special “one-night-only” ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event in the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, Friday, March 3, 6:30 p.m. (doors) / 7-8:45 p.m. performance. Performing worldwide since the 1990s, Nakatani-san has released over 80 recordings and toured extensively, often performing 150 concerts or more per year. Celebrated for his solo work as an improvisor and experimental musician, he also has a long history of collaboration – including his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. Teaching master classes and giving lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world, Nakatani is originally from Japan, but now makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Nakatani’s distinctive music is 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. According to the artist-composer: “Ma is an important part of my relationship to sound. Ma is an idea – meaning space, distance, air, feelings, and things in between…” As Nakatani continues, “It is the silence between the notes which make the music.”
The Nakatani Gong Orchestra – NGO – is a nomadic, large ensemble 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 compositions. 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. At the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, fourteen local volunteers (FSW students, faculty – as well as, community members – trained musicians and “non-musicians” alike) will perform on seventeen Chinese wind gongs of various sizes under the instruction of and following a solo set by Mr. Nakatani.
This special ArtSPEAK@FSW concert-event is free and open to the public.
About The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery was founded as The Gallery of Fine Art in 1979 on the Lee County campus of Florida Southwestern State College/FSW (then Edison Community College). On June 4th 2004, the Gallery of Fine Art was renamed the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery to honor and commemorate our longtime association and friendship with the artist. Over more than three decades until his death, the Gallery worked closely with Rauschenberg to present world premiere exhibitions including multiple installations of the “¼ Mile or Two Furlong Piece”. The artist insisted on naming the space the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (versus the “Robert Rauschenberg Gallery”) as it was consistent with the intimate, informal relationship he maintained with both our local Southwest Florida community and FSW.
Open to the public, free of charge.
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Closed Sundays and Holidays
Source: Florida Southwestern State College