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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

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!

Learning How to Kiai in a Pandemic by Molly Bergen

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I was a shy kid who rarely raised my voice, even on the playground, yet as long as I remember I’ve been drawn to the drums. When I was eight or nine, and a recent transplant to northern California from the East Coast, my parents took me to see Stanford Taiko. I was transfixed by the entire thing — the deep pulse of the odaiko that I could feel in my chest, the crisp articulation of a dozen drummers playing in unison, the sudden swells in volume until everyone was playing full out. I also loved the energy of the players, who smiled and grimaced and sweated and yelled through it all. I had no idea what they were saying, but somehow it made sense anyway.

Since then, my love of drumming has taken me lots of places, from school concert band to jazz set lessons, from West African drumming classes to my college “found-object percussion group,” before bringing me back to taiko in 2011, when I picked up a flyer for an “intro to taiko” workshop by Mark H Rooney. Nine (!) years later, I’m a member of Miyako Taiko and the Mark H Taiko Connection.

In my ongoing efforts to become a better performer, kiai (the unintelligible yelling I remember from my first taiko show) has always been a big challenge for me. Kiai is used to convey emotion and communicate with fellow taiko players — to give energy to a tired soloist, for example — as well as the audience. A taiko song could be played perfectly, but if there is no kiai, it will probably sound like something is missing. But knowing all this hasn’t made it much easier for me to do it. I constantly have to remind myself “don’t forget to kiai,” which just goes to show how unnatural it is for me.

Fast-forward to early March 2020. I arrived at Miyako practice to find Mark Clorox-wiping bachi. Everyone was on edge. The coronavirus outbreak had just been declared a pandemic, and state and city leaders were starting to ban large gatherings of people.  We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the last practice we’d be having for a while.

After talking through some recent news developments (including the cancellation of Sakura Taiko Fest, our flagship annual show, as well as the entire cherry blossom performance season), we set up the drums to run through a couple of songs. On that particular Thursday, after a stressful week, it felt great to hit the drum as hard as I could. I was surprised to hear myself yelling, too — and it felt different this time.

Instead of my brain telling my mouth what to yell like it  normally does (“Try yelling this sound!”), I didn’t even have to think about the emotions I should be conveying. I just felt them, and then I heard them coming from my own lips — not actual words, more like primal sounds of all the emotions I had built up in recent weeks of seeing COVID-19 slowly take over and then upend our world. Frustration. Anger. Fear. Grief.

Expressing these all-consuming emotions was exhausting, but it also felt good. And as we moved on to a lighter song, and I looked around at so many people smiling for the first time of the evening, another feeling rose to the surface: immense gratitude for this group of people that I get to play with every week (in normal life, anyway).

More than 40 days into social distancing here in Washington, D.C., taiko practice is one of the things I have been missing the most. I can’t wait for that first post-pandemic practice, whenever that may be — something tells me we’ll need that kiai more than ever.

Photos copyright Thomas Huggins

 

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