The Colby Taiko Club and students from this spring's music course titled, Taiko: Music, Movement, and Meaning will give a joint outdoor taiko performance on Thursday, May 6 at 4:30 p.m. on the Schupf Sculpture Court in front of the Colby Museum of Art.
Ever wonder where last week's Echo video of Obama came from, and who was behind the videos that made it all the way to The Huffington Post?
It used to be that if you were a newly married woman in Jiangyong County in China (or in any part of China for that matter), you had to live in conditions of extreme oppression based on gender. Bound feet, forced child marriages, barriers to education, and immense subjugation from both husband and mother-in-law was the norm. But what was special about living in Jiangyong County was that while other women in the surrounding counties were illiterate and had lost virtually all contact with their natal families after marriage, the women of Jiangyong County still had the ability to communicate with other women using a system of writing called “Nushu.”
Wynn Yamami is the current artist in residence at the College. Hailing from New York City, he is a pianist, composer, percussionist and taiko drummer. He and I are sitting in the Pugh Community room—he as the amused interviewee and I as the bewildered reporter.
For 1.3 billion-plus people, the New Year festivities for 2010 did not come and go in a single midnight hour, nor did they fizzle out with the drop of a massive, 11,875-pound sparkling ball from high above Times Square in New York (because let's face it, the party's over once the ball drops).
This Saturday's Chorale performance, People of Passion: A World in Song, reminded me why I enjoy attending musical concerts so much-far more than I like listening to any recorded version of song on a digital device. It's because, simply put, there is just no way to transport the immense beauty and melodiousness of live song combined with the incredible feeling of fraternity amidst an audience of fellow music-lovers onto the limited boundaries of a musical recording.
