My eleventh residency at the Showa Music Academy in Kawasaki since 1998 included: * performance on a gala percussion concert in the academy’s opera house (Teatro Giglio) * 44 private lessons * 11 small ensemble coaching sessions * 1 Creative Music Making (freeform improvisation) workshop * 1 videotaped interview for students in the English language… Read more »

On Sat. Dec. 11 at the end of the first week of my residency at Showa,  I woke up and 7 AM and worked on my computer for several hours.  It was a free day with no lessons and only rehearsals scheduled for the afternoon.  From noon until 5 PM I was involved in a… Read more »

At Holiday time I usually write about the great Family and Pops concerts that NEXUS has available, or I remind you of their choral repertoire. (If you are not familiar, click here and here!) But Garry Kvistad just sent me an article from the American Bell Association that has me thinking about the many winter… Read more »

  I have been visiting the Showa Academy of Music in Japan almost every year since 1998.  When NEXUS toured to Okinawa in 1997, I was introduced to Kazunori Meguro by Yoji Sadanari, who had studied at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, and who knew all of us in NEXUS. When Kazunori (‘Kaz’)… Read more »

Last night, I had a wonderful meal at a great little Toronto restaurant called Southern Accent. A couple of friends remember performing Zydeco at that restaurant, some years back. It reminded me that I had some notes put away for a blog post! Zydeco is a form of American roots music that evolved from the… Read more »

Further to Bob Becker’s blog posting of Dec. 8, 2011 I also received a request from Yale graduate student Victor Caccese to addess a few questions about the beginning of NEXUS.     Mr. Cahn, I mainly want to ask you about the start of Nexus with your first performances in 1971. Even though all… Read more »

The musical Chess recently completed its run here in Toronto, and I just finished reading The Eight by Katherine Neville. The latter is a fascinating romp of a novel featuring a mystical chess set and a tapestry of historical characters scouring the world for it. Not least among them is the opera composer Francois-Andre Danican… Read more »

NEXUS has just returned home from the whirlwind that is the Percussive Arts Society’s International Conference (PASIC) in Indianapolis. Garry Kvistad found an interesting email in his in-box from his cousin in Chicago: a great article from the Arizona Republic. Do you think the triangle is a “no-brainer” kind of percussion instrument? Check out this… Read more »

The questions below about starting a career in music performance were submitted to me by Peter Ferry, a third-year applied percussion major at the Eastman School of Music.  They are all good questions which are frequently asked by career-track music students.  The responses are never easy or simple, and can be complex enough to fill… Read more »

The last two weeks of October have been rich in concerts and unexpected percussion influences. It kicked off mid-month with the wonderful SFJazz Collective presenting their take on the rhythmic-rich Stevie Wonder repertoire as well as a selection of new compositions at Koerner Hall here in Toronto. A couple days later, NEXUS presented their glorious… Read more »

The NEXUS and 2X10 concert last week in Toronto was wonderful. Bill Cahn’s hypnotic new arrangement of Takemitsu’s From me flows what you call Time opened wide skies of sound. The two ensembles took us from the world premiere of Alice Ping Yee Ho’s elegant Heart to Heart, through the Canadian premiere of Steve Reich’s… Read more »