In 1999 NEXUS was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society’s Hall of Fame. Inaugurated in 1972 the Hall of Fame has welcomed many of the greatest percussion personalities into its ranks. It is impossible to list them all here, and even more difficult to decide who to mention on a “short list”, but here are… Read more »
Thanks for an exceptional concert last night, everyone! Judging by the many enthusiastic comments that swirled around me at intermission and afterwards, I was definitely not alone in finding the music (Rite of Spring and The Planets) exciting, sublime, and played to perfection by NEXUS, Midori Koga and Lydia Wong (a tour de force!), and… Read more »
We have a guest blogger today. Craig is going to tell us about moving NEXUS around North America! Thanks, Craig, for this behind-the-scenes look! My name is Craig Snowden and since Autumn 2004 I have been working on the road with NEXUS. I have been asked to write a short blog about my experiences on… Read more »
Join us at Walter Hall in Toronto for the opening of the University of Toronto’s Faculty Artists Series featuring NEXUS and the piano duo 2 x 10 (Midori Koga and Lydia Wong). Also performing will be the University’s Women’s Chamber Choir and special guest, percussionist John Rudolph.
Here is a lovely review by Gene Tyranny that Bob Becker has discovered on the Midomi site (visit it here to read the original). The review is undated, but provides a most sensitive description of NEXUS’ signature work, Toru Takemitsu’s From me flows what you call Time… Performed by the percussion group Nexus, and the… Read more »
Creating, commissioning and developing repertoire is a huge part of NEXUS. New material is always in the works, written by all the NEXUS members, each of whom is a composer in his own right.
I believe this is my hundredth NEXUS blog post! Bob, Bill, Robin, Garry, Russell and Ray have also been posting, but this is Number One Hundred for me personally. We’ve covered a lot of ground together, haven’t we ?! Composers, film, organizations, sponsors, travels and sights, programming ideas, workshops, art, clinics, education, symposiums, concerts, sound… Read more »
The release of the terrific new Canadian Brass recording featuring NEXUS got me thinking about other collaborations that NEXUS has enjoyed over the years. Here is a particularly unusual one: In 1982, NEXUS created a three-volume set of recordings with Canadian poet out-of-print, but an article by Ted Shaw in the Windsor Star in October… Read more »
The NEXUS CD Rune features three major works commissioned by and composed for NEXUS by award-winning Canadian composers John Hawkins, James Tenney and Bruce Mather. It also features cover art by Regan Morris: two works entitled Lightning and Lightning #2.
With NEXUS being in Japan this month, I thought I would do a little armchair travelling of my own. I have been looking at Kobe and the Hyogo area where the guys are performing.
NEXUS leaves for Japan this weekend, where they will be performing their signature work by Toru Takemitsu, From me flows what you call Time,
The interesting mallet photo here is the logo from percussionist Bob Becker’s annual Ragtime Xylophone Institute. Last year, Stewart created a very nice piece about NEXUS founding member John Wyre and posted it to his blog. You can link over to Stewart’s website and read it there (scroll down; it is the post directly below… Read more »
In two weeks’ time, NEXUS will be performing in the extraordinarily beautiful Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Nishinomiya City near Osaka and Kobe in the Hyogo Prefecture. As mentioned in my earlier blog post, the Center was opened in 2005 to mark the ten-year anniversary of the Great Hanshin Earthquake which largely devastated Nishinomiya and… Read more »
The Canadian Brass back in February, NEXUS members were busy with the Canadian Brass, recording the stirring arrangements of Robin Engelman. Robin blogged about it here. You can check out the excellent reviews of the recording – as well as an interview with Robin and Chuck Daellenbach of the CBrass – here. Enjoy!
If you are a percussionist, you might do a double-take when you see the Kobe Port Tower in Kobe, Japan. It is designed to look like a tsuzumi, a traditional Japanese hand drum! And NEXUS will be seeing it soon. After a remarkable 3 months with sell-outs in Toronto, Minnesota and New York State, NEXUS… Read more »
