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Mark H Rooney Taiko

Taiko Instructor & Performer

Taiko Voices

Since 2011, thousands of people have become a part of our greater community and I am repeatedly humbled by the remarkable individuals who share their energies, talents and stories - the students, performers, collaborators, guest artists and, certainly, the audience. I am thrilled that we can now offer an opportunity for everyone to gain insight into the true lifeblood of Mark H Taiko and I hope that you will find their voices as inspiring as I do!
– Mark H

Mark H Taiko’s First Online “Meet the Artist” by Lee Blank

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Building community and supporting other artists are founding principles of the Mark H Taiko experience, so it came as no surprise that Mark H. Rooney would quickly pivot to online offerings during the pandemic. I’ve had the great privilege to study taiko with Mark in his Takoma Park community classes since early 2014. Since then I’ve gotten to play in community with others, perform in festivals, attend fantastic concerts and study a wide variety of techniques in workshops with guest artists. This “former non-musician” even built her own drum!

But for me, by far the best Mark H offering has been the amazing Meet the Artist events. Mark has brought some of the greatest taiko artists in the world to share with us, in an intimate, small-group setting. In the last few years I’ve had the great joy to hear from and see performances by Shoji Kameda, Kaoru Watanabe, Tiffany Tamaribuchi, Marco Lienhard, and Kenny Endo, and to learn Obon dance from Noriko Nakamura.

Since being bitten by the taiko bug, I follow lots of taiko folks online, and in the fall of 2019 I was excited to hear about a Kickstarter campaign for HERbeat. If you aren’t familiar, HERbeat was an amazing all-women taiko project, culminating in a concert and making-of movie project. I quickly donated and have followed the project with great interest, so imagine my delight when Mark announced that one of the HERbeat artists, Yurika Chiba, would be our first virtual “Meet the Artist” guest.

Yurika plays with San Jose Taiko and her infectious enthusiasm is incredible.  She’s also a talented, whimsical artist and creator of TaikoCat. Logging on to her Meet the Artist event, I was happy to see so many familiar, and new, faces on the Zoom screen, playfully toasting with Kombucha, cider, or tea.  As always the event felt intimate and was a perfect combination of personal introduction/background and experiential participation. We learned a lot about Yurika’s journey to taiko and art. She led us in a flash-card guided movement exercise that was ideal for the Zoom platform.  She also shared philosophy on cue cards. One that particularly resonated with me was “the fullness of life is incubated in its messy places.” Indeed.

The audience participated in a good and wide-ranging Q&A session, finally getting the definitive answer to the question “Does Canadian money smell like syrup?” (Depends on what you had for breakfast). My only regret was not being able to see, hear, and feel Yurika play in person. I’ll hold out hope for that to happen in future.

If you have the opportunity to join a future “Meet the Artist” event, don’t miss the chance. These are the “cream of the crop” of performers and teachers in the taiko world, brought to your virtual doorstep, by a kind and generous man who helped introduce me to my inner drummer.

To sign up for the next online Meet the Artist with David Wells, click here.

Rediscovering the fun in music by Becky Schwartz

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I’ve spent many years with music, but my background is in Western music.  I started playing alto saxophone in fourth grade and continued music recreationally through graduate school. (Yes, pep band counted towards my graduate degree.) I performed in school concert and marching bands and took private lessons throughout middle and high school. Switching around instruments until I stuck with French horn, mellophone (the marching version of the French horn), and piano.

Looking back, most of my classes and performances focused on perfection and precision—for instance, making sure to exactly follow the conductor’s tempo and only listening to feedback from the conductor or other music instructor and not from a peer. This complemented my perfectionist personality. Sometimes, the band director or music instructor wanted us to have “fun.” “Just have fun and rock out,” my college marching band director instructed for portions of our Guitar Hero show. He didn’t take the time to explain what that meant. I rocked my body with the music and pretended I was having a great time.  That perfectionism and precision mindset prevented me from feeling connected to anything but the music and marching movement. I occasionally felt a connection to the crowd, conductors, and fellow players. But for the most part, I faked that connection.

Joining the Mark H Taiko School helped me rediscover the fun and connection in playing music. Mark builds connection between players through explanation, demonstration, drills, songs, and peer to peer feedback. Rather than Mark just saying the words “have fun,” we practice connection. Exercises connect one or more players through eye contact, kiai, body movement, facial expression, and feedback discussion. At first, this felt strange and intimidating. “I don’t know these people. I don’t normally make prolonged eye contact,” I timidly thought (of course, while trying to make eye contact with other students during these drills).

Then, at the Sakura Taiko Takeover last year, one of my fellow Miayko players pretended to bump into me during a song. She shared a smile and funny eyebrow raise to remind me to relax and share the fun. Once I started catching another student’s eye and smile in that way, I felt the connection. I wanted to share that joyous feeling with my fellow students. Later on, I realized connecting to other players brought enthusiasm to playing and performing I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Now, we are in COVID times. Close physical presence is not safe at the moment. But that doesn’t mean the physical and emotional connection have disappeared for Miyako. Our practices have gone virtual, where I enjoy watching everyone drum at slightly different tempos due to internet lag. Our Miyako practice now serves as time to both learn taiko and catch our breath from unprecedented and unexpected events. Even though these activities take place virtually, I still feel emotionally connected to my fellow members. I look forward to our post-Covid practices. I know we will continue our connections from before the pandemic, despite everything that happened in between.

 

Choosing to Hit a Taiko by Jim Barnds

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Writing about taiko feels wrong.

On my first attempt to start writing about drumming, I realized that formalizing my thoughts or verbalizing the experience (beyond the occasional kiai) seems fundamentally misdirected.  My core experience of taiko is visceral, and to the extent that I’m in my head during practice, it’s generally not useful to anyone other than myself.  It’s usually not much use to me, for that matter. Those thoughts often take the form of self-recrimination: “Why am I tuning out after the third line?” or “I wish I had found more time to run through this section on my own last week.”  I have many consciously-formed thoughts, but I don’t know how much of it is purely about the drumming versus the intrusion of leftover concerns from work; frustratingly incomplete to-do lists from home; or vestigial irritation from encounters with lane-crowding drivers or wide-sitting metro commuters.  Taiko is sufficiently enmeshed in the fabric of my life that it’s hard to neatly separate that experience from the rest.  There are other folks far more deeply entwined than I am, so perhaps my experience is transitional.

My next instinct is to segue to a Dave Berry-esque train-of-consciousness ramble that attempts to capture my experience of drumming as I’m drumming. Why is hitting a taiko drum so utterly satisfying?  And allow me to emphasize “utterly.” As in “Oh yeah.”  Not the “Oh yeah” that comes out with an ascendant breeziness; I’m talking about the one that rumbles in your chest and comes out with that deep, resonant bass that could start an avalanche. When I’m playing, that satisfaction almost immediately transitions to need, as in “I want to do that again, right now.”  I don’t know what the drum is vibing with, all I know is that it is good. If we sometimes struggle to be heard in the world, this drum is the antidote.  The drum will reward you generously for even a fairly-good hit.  I don’t know that I’ve ever hit a drum perfectly, but I can’t wait to find out what that’s like.

So why do I choose the hit the drum? It’s not an angry experience. The drums never did anything to me. I hold them perfectly innocent in all of this.  If anything, the drum is a partner, like that smart horse in the old westerns that somehow shows up in the right place to allow a quick getaway when needed, that doesn’t flinch when you jump onto its back from a second-story window.  More than that, though, the drum is a translator.  It converts the energy of exertion into communication.  Wherever that energy originates, the drum can turn it into something better.  Frustrations can be re-channeled into something cathartic and even useful.

That’s where it gets interesting. When that energy starts reforming into something external, it can take on a different character. What might have started as annoyance can shift into exuberance. When expressed in concert with others, that inward focus can alter to communal fun. If done even half-right, it even sounds pretty good. Playing three-quarters right would probably feel awesome.  I want to find out.  For me, for now, the best I have are flashes of “pretty good” and that’s enough to pull me back for another round. Giddy-up!

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