My musical background is in Western classical percussion – a very broad term that covers many instruments, playing techniques and musical contexts. In fact, it’s so broad that it’s hard to explain exactly what I do.
At the basic level, a percussionist can strike, stroke, tinkle, jingle, jangle, tap and ting just about anything to elicit a sound and create music, so the number of percussion instruments is vast.
Over millennia, countries and cultures have crafted their own unique sounds from wood, skin and metal, and in the process developed distinct musical languages. In the West, composers have been inspired by the extraordinary colours, textures and rhythms of other places – think the Turkish Janissary music in Haydn’s ‘Military’ Symphony or the tambourine and castanets in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. This is all well and good, but often in the process of composing for instruments that come from other cultures, we can be ignorant of their original context. This brings me to my own odyssey – the taiko.
Ian Cleworth. Photo supplied.
In the early 1980s, I had the opportunity to study taiko in Japan with Sen Amano, a...
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