Flying in Place: Notes of a Taiko Beginner

You do not learn an instrument to play it; you play it to learn.
—Heidi Varian, The Way of Taiko
 
I was eleven years old, huddling on the stairway above the front hall of my family’s house, a stack of music books on my lap and my face wet with tears. It was time for my father to drive me to my weekly piano lesson—but on this day, much to the dismay of my well-intentioned parents, all I could do was sit on the stairs and cry. Throwing tantrums wasn’t my style, but I could find no other way to convey the inchoate distress that was all tangled up with my piano playing, distress that was finally mounting to a crisis.
 
My parents started me on piano lessons when I was seven years old, assuring me that someday I’d be glad. But gladness remained elusive. I hadn’t chosen the piano; unlike most of my musical friends, I hadn’t gravitated to my instrument out of delight or yearning or curiosity. My lessons and practicing were stiff and joyless affairs, suffused with self-reproach. Periodically my gentle piano teacher held small, informal recitals at his house—events that, in a kind attempt to minimize his students’ anxiety, he referred to as “get-togethers.” Despite his laid-back supportiveness, my guts would ice and curdle for days leading up to these gatherings, which failed to ease my performance anxiety. Friends wondered at my lack of musical confidence. I wondered where such confidence could be found.
 
*  *  *
 
“Don, Don, Don, Don, DON, DON, DON, DON!”

A dozen adults, all novice Taiko players, stand widely spaced in a high-school gym. We face our instructor from behind practice drums made from sections of fifteen-inch-diameter PVC pipe. The makeshift cylinders are painted a flaking dark green, with skins stretched over the top end, folded down and riveted just below the rim. The drums are open at the bottom, suspended a foot above the ground on simple wooden frames, drumheads parallel to the floor.
 
We call our instructor “sensei,” Japanese for “teacher.” Our wooden drumsticks, she tells us, are “bachi.” My classmates and I hold them loosely in the triangle between thumb and forefinger, gripping them against our palms with pinky and ring finger. We position ourselves so that when our arms stretch forward, the sticks’ tips nearly meet in the drumhead’s center. On the sensei’s cue, we lift the right-hand bachi a few inches before letting it drop to hit the drum: “Don.”
 
As the right arm drops, we lift the left—and rhythmically, fluidly alternating between hands, we play a slow sequence of eight beats. As we raise our arms successively higher, each pair of “Dons” rings out louder than the last. Mounting drumbeats reverberate in the cavernous room.
 
Our Japanese-born sensei is a strong, graceful Californian with a stand-up’s comic timing. She came to drumming after an injury sidelined her from other martial arts. Her name happens to be Taeko, which, she tells the class, translates as “child of many blessings”—while taiko means “fat drum.” Letting that sink in, she grimaces pointedly at us from under drolly furrowed brows. We laugh. To American ears, the difference in pronunciation is subtle at best. Yet, clearly, to confuse these two words in a social situation could have awkward consequences. With twinkling eyes and a mock-disapproving frown, Taeko of the many blessings concedes that if we should slip and call her by the wrong name, she will—perhaps grudgingly—respond to “fat drum.”
 
Our percussive discipline combines music, dance, and martial arts. With centuries-old roots in traditional East Asian village drumming, it was reinvented in the mid-20^th century as an ensemble performance art. Taeko-sensei explains that she will be teaching us a drumming style whose power relies more on cooperation between gravity and skeletal mechanics than on the muscular strength featured by some of the more athletic Taiko ensembles. She has us stand with our knees slightly bent, our feet a bit farther apart than our shoulders. Pelvis tucked, we sit into the empty space between our legs—body weight cradled by the hip girdle, like an infant suspended in a bouncy-seat. Atop this rooted stance, our upper bodies can ride loose and relaxed—ready to twist, stretch, and freely strike the drum.
 
With weight forward and elbows bent in a gentle curve to embrace the space before us, we bring the right hand forward and up. Then we relax and bend the elbow close to the body, allowing the tip of the stick to drop back down onto the drumhead, and rocking back onto our heels. For smaller, quieter strokes, the lifting motion emanates from fingers and wrists. As we bring the bachi successively higher with each stroke in order to intensify the sound, we initiate the lift with elbows, then shoulders, and finally with the muscles of the ribcage, ever more energetically driving the upward reach:
 
“Don, Don, Don, Don, DON, DON, DON, DON!”
 
Over and over, we practice moving through this drumbeat crescendo. The unfamiliar motions gradually come to feel more natural, and I start to experience each stroke as an impulse that begins somewhere beneath the soles of my feet, deep in the ground on which I stand: a wave of energy rising from the earth itself, through my legs and hips and into my core. As I inhale, that elemental energy soars within me, until it throws my pliant arm forward and up and travels through my bachi toward the sky.
 
There’s a brief weightless moment, bachi poised in the air, before the breath releases and the motion transitions from rising to falling—and then all the potential energy of my raised arm transforms into a downward kinetic rush. Gravity reclaims my extended torso; swiftly-falling drumstick meets drumhead in a resounding “DON!” My contracting core absorbs the impact. Then, releasing the tension, I exhale still further, as the flow continues downward, past the drumhead and through the cylinder, beneath the linoleum floor and into the earth, where it reverses course to rise again. In this infinite looping sequence, this vibrating dance, the drum and I seem to be playing each other—or perhaps the earth and sky are playing us both.
 
The subtle forward-back rocking of the body’s weight; the lift-and-drop wheeling of the bachi; the expansion and compression of the breath: my head isn’t yet sure what to make of all these interlinking cycles, or how they are supposed to fit together. But my body seems to recognize something ancient and familiar—as if I’m taking flight for the first time, in dim recollection of winged incarnation. A light kindles within me, and I feel myself projecting the same intensely focused beam of energy that I have seen in the eyes of Taiko players performing at festivals and concert halls.
 
Teaching us a drum-song phrase by phrase, the sensei seems to intuit just how much novelty we beginners can absorb. She gradually introduces nuances of technique, gently correcting our form when necessary. She challenges us without loading on too many new ideas at a time. She says, “If this is too much to think about right now, then don’t worry about it.”
 
She helps us understand that the layered skills we are acquiring demand repeated exposure and practice; to absorb them into muscle memory will take time. She gives us plenty of permission to get it wrong at first, and repeatedly; errors are inseparable from the learning process. When we get frustrated, she cracks jokes to lighten the mood.
 
With her encouragement and sense of humor, the sensei sustains the enthusiasm that brought us beginners here in the first place. She makes space for each of us to learn at our own pace. And she keeps us from getting too tangled up in our heads, which is important: Taiko doesn’t emanate from the brain, but from the belly-mind—the hara, the essential center of energy and wisdom deep in the body’s core.
 
*  *  *
 
My dad did finally get me out the door to my lesson on that tearful morning a half-century ago. And then, a couple of years later, I ended up quitting formal piano study. Even so, I eventually became grateful—just as they’d promised I would —for my parents’ foresight in starting me on a musical path. Playing the piano as a child led me to more fruitful creative endeavors as I grew older. And now, as I approach 60, Taiko has rekindled in me a wild young spirit, the one who struggled so hard to break free in childhood.  I feel her rising to meet the call of the drum.

previously published in phren-Z.