Submitted by: Submitted by bettyli80
Views: 596
Words: 802
Pages: 4
Category: Music and Cinema
Date Submitted: 02/10/2011 01:10 PM
A Concert of Gagaku
Gagaku is one of the oldest continuous music traditions on earth tracing its history to the 9th Century. It is uniquely Japanese utilizing instruments and techniques unknown in the ‘West’ until the cultures collided around the 16th Century. Gagaku is an artful blend of instrumental & vocal music and dance. Through the years, Gagaku performers have been providing entertainment with their unique and diverse style of music. However, a live performance by a Gagaku performer has an altogether different effect which elates one to higher levels of music thrill. An opportunity of such kind came my way and I grabbed it with both my hands. The concert of Gagaku music performed in the University of Hawaii which I was fortunate to witness. Every single audience member who was at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2004, must have thanked the hall’s designer and architect Frank Gehry for his dream to have a gagaku concert in the hall. Reigakusha Gagaku Ensemble, a group that plays Japan’s oldest performing art known as gagaku, made that dream a reality with a one-time performance that evening.
The hall was filled with an audience of 1,450 people, each attentively inclining forward to listen to Japan’s, and arguably the worlds, oldest form of music, which has a history of more than one thousand years. I’m very pleased that we had such a large audience in the United States and I’m also so happy that people enjoyed our performance,” Sukeyasu Shiba, founder and music director of Reigakusha Gagaku Ensemble, said with an excited voice after the performance. Between the performances, Robert Garfias, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine and foremost expert of gagaku study in the United States, explained gagaku to the audience. Garfias said that gagaku was “music for the entertainment of the court nobles. Gagaku has a great refinement and is very slow, graceful, powerful and expressive music.”
After the first part of the...