The rousing beat of the taiko drum evokes a sense of “traditional” Japan. It conjures local community festivals, religious celebration, and, for some, the darkly energetic rumble of war. The musical genre of ensemble taiko drumming, however, is a post-WWII creation. In Taiko Boom, Shawn Bender introduces how, beginning in the early 1950s, a handful of groups succeeded in pairing innovative marketing, expressive performance styles, and creative musical arrangements to create the genre recognized internationally today as taiko drumming. Beyond his important collation of the historical development of the genre, Bender extends his analysis of taiko drumming as a “new folk performing art” (p. 12) into arenas that make this work a welcome contribution to studies of globalization, music, and Japan studies more generally.
At once an eminently local and successfully global musical form, taiko drumming is constrained and constituted by a tension, as taut as a drum-skin, between...
