taiko, shinobue, and shakuhachi
Kiyoshi Nagata, the ensemble’s artistic director, has been performing in a career that spans 41 years. He has taught taiko at the U of T Faculty of Music since 1998. He also taught a public taiko course at the Royal Conservatory of Music from 2003 to 2011, and helped to found two community taiko groups in Burlington and Toronto. He is regularly invited by universities and taiko groups to present workshops and lectures. As a solo artist, he has composed and performed taiko music for dance, theatre, film, video games and radio and continues to collaborate with artists from all genres of music including traditional Japanese instrumentalists.
Kiyoshi’s principal studies were with Daihachi Oguchi (as artistic director and performer of the Toronto-based, Suwa Daiko from 1982 to 1992) and with Kodo (as an apprentice from 1993 to 1994). With the assistance of a Chalmers Performing Arts Training Grant in 1999, Kiyoshi studied western classical percussion with Paul Houle at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. In 1994, Kiyoshi founded the cross-cultural percussion ensemble, Humdrum, whose debut Toronto performance was ranked fourth in Now Magazine’s “Top Ten Concerts of 1995”.
