Composers and percussionists Tatsuya Nakatani and Bobby Previte perform with a live webstream at wgxc.org.
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.
Bobby Previte is a composer and performer whose work explores the nexus between notated and improvised music. One of the seminal figures of the 1980s New York ‘Downtown’ scene, Previte is the recipient of the 2015 Greenfield Prize for music and was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2012. He has received multiple awards for composition from the NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, New Music USA, The Jerome Foundation, The New York State Music Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the American Music Center. Mr. Previte has been an artist-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, Civitella Ranieri, The Montalvo Arts Center, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, and nine times at the MacDowell Colony. His original compositions have been recorded and released on Sony, Elektra, Rykodisc, Palmetto, New World, Ropeadope, Tzadik, Thirsty Ear, Cantaloupe and Rarenoise. Leading a plethora of diverse ensembles from his instrument, the drums, he has collaborated with many of the leading lights in and beyond the world of music, including master composer John Adams, iconic singer Tom Waits, pantheon filmmaker Robert Altman, and most recently, rock legend Iggy Pop. His music has been labeled as ‘utterly original,’ by the New York Times, while The New Yorker has said his ensembles ‘speak in visionary tongues.’ Mr. Previte has given master classes at schools and universities around the world including The Eastman School of Music, The New School, Bard College, and Princeton University. His recent work includes: TERMINALS, Five Concertos for Percussion Ensemble and Soloist, with SO Percussion, released October 28th, 2014 by Cantaloupe Music, GONE, with Bobby Previte & the Visitors, released summer 2016 on the forTune label, TERMINALS QUARTETS, the percussion only version of Terminals, summer 2016, by Cantaloupe Music, and MASS, a music in nine parts for choir, pipe organ, and metal trio, released April 2017 by Rarenoise Records. His newest work, RHAPSODY, a song cycle on the subject of migration, was commissioned by the Greenfield Prize at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and premiered April 21, 2017 at New College in Sarasota, Florida. Scored for acoustic guitar, harp, piano, voice, drums and saxophone, and featuring a powerhouse band of Zeena Parkins, John Medeski, Nels Cline, Fabian Rucker, and Jen Shyu, RHAPSODY was released in January, 2018 by Rarenoise.