Speaking Gagaku as Living Culture — Public Dialogues at Hobonichi School
In 2025, following his appearance the previous year, Drifter’s CEO Taro Ishida was invited again to Hobonichi School, where he created and presented two dialogue-based lecture programs.
The invitation came directly from Hobonichi, prompted by the strong response to the earlier lectures.
The request was clear: to explore Gagaku more deeply, and to move beyond explanation alone — allowing audiences to physically experience the music through live performance.
Beyond Introduction: Finding the Position of Gagaku
What was required was not simply an introduction to Gagaku, but a reframing of music itself — locating where Gagaku stands within a broader musical, cultural, and social landscape, and articulating its uniqueness in language accessible to a general audience.
In the dialogue with Shigesato Itoi, Gagaku was discussed in relation to music from around the world, placing it within wider cultural and historical contexts.
In the session with Seiji Kameda, contemporary Japanese pop music served as a point of comparison.
By examining differences and shared qualities, the conversation moved toward questions about the future possibilities of Gagaku.
Designing Understanding as Experience
Each program ran for approximately two hours.
Rather than simplifying ideas, the focus was on shaping them into forms that would truly resonate — designing the structure, questions, and flow of language so that understanding could settle naturally.
Live performance was integrated throughout the lectures.
By allowing audiences to hear the sound directly, areas difficult to grasp through words alone were shared as experience.
The response in the venue was highly positive, with many participants noting how the music clarified ideas at a visceral level.
A Rare Voice Bridging Gagaku and Contemporary Thought
This project demonstrates Ishida’s unique position in Japan:
a musician capable of speaking about Gagaku not only as a historical tradition, but as a living cultural foundation — connected to modern music, contemporary society, and how people think and work today.
At Drifter, we work not only on music production, but also on clarifying the core intention of a project and shaping lectures and dialogues into coherent experiences.
This case shows our ability to support highly specialized cultural themes and deliver them to a broad audience — from conceptual design through live performance — without confining them to music specialists alone.
