Nakatani Gong Orchestra

Tatsuya Nakatani brings his 17-piece Gong Orchestra to SPACE for a night of immersive soundscapes and avant-garde percussion.

The Nakatani Gong Orchestra is a contemporary live sound art project that tours internationally. Led by percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, the orchestra encompasses 17 bronze Chinese Wind Gongs, played by Nakatani and 16 local musicians, as well as custom handmade gong bows and hardware are crafted by Nakatani at his atelier, Nakatani-Kobo.

Ideas began germinating for the NGO in early 2002 and Nakatani finally took the project on the road in April 2011. Since then he has performed over 100 concerts with NGO internationally. The rich harmonies produced from multiple layers of orchestral gongs are transformative, engaging, and inspiring for both players and audiences. Each performance is unique, as they are composed, improvised, and conducted by Nakatani and involve players that he trains from each community the NGO visits. 

NGO is a continuous, growing community engagement sound art project, as well as the only bowing gong orchestra (in which gongs are played using bows handcrafted by Nakatani) in existence in the world today. Artistic concept, musical composition, conduction, and direction are all the work of Tatsuya Nakatani.

Tatsuya Nakatani is a Japanese avant-garde percussionist and acoustic sound artist. Based in the United States, he has released over 80 recordings in the last two decades and toured all over the world. Nakatani has developed his own unique instrumentation and extended techniques, creating new sounds utilizing gongs, drums, cymbals, singing bowls, wooden sticks, metal objects, and the idiosyncratic bows and mallets he handcrafts in his workshop. He sculpts an intense, intuitively primitive, expressive sound form that defies genre. His work engages improvised-experimental music and movement, while retaining the traditional sense of space, depth and deep time found in Japanese art.