Dr. Martin Regan’s Love Of Japan Leads To World Shakuhachi Festival’s Arrival In Aggieland
Dr. Martin Regan has felt a deep connection to Japanese culture since he was a young adult.
His introduction came as a budding musician during his college years, leading to a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and experience. He lived in Japan for seven years and became an expert on Japanese instruments including the shakuhachi, an end-blown bamboo flute which was imported from China to Japan in the eighth century.
Now Regan, a professor in the Music Performance program, is bringing the 2025 World Shakuhachi Festival to the Texas A&M University campus, hosted by the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. The event, to be held April 17-20, will bring artists and educators from around the world to showcase the importance of the instrument and of Japanese culture.
“The 2025 World Shakuhachi Festival is an event that will leave a footprint in the cultural consciousness of Texas A&M, Bryan-College Station, Texas and beyond for years to come,” he said. “To grow awareness of this instrument, its repertoire and the power of cross-cultural collaboration.”
‘Enamored With Japan’
Regan, a Long Island, New York, native, found his love of music at age 12 when he began playing the trumpet. At 14, he knew he wanted to compose music, and his interests expanded to piano, flute and bass guitar.
While pursuing a degree in composition at Oberlin College in Ohio, a friend suggested a course in Japanese religion. The course also served as an introduction to Japanese music and Buddhist chanting. With his interest sparked, Regan took other courses in Japanese art and history, and began studying the language. Following graduation in 1995, he moved to Japan and spent four years teaching English at public junior high schools.
“I was totally enamored with Japan,” Regan said. “I thought about how I could combine my passion for music, composition and Japanese culture, and put the wheels in motion to become an ethnomusicologist and specialist in composing for Japanese instruments.”
After a year of pursuing a Master of Arts in composition at the University of California, Riverside, Regan moved to Tokyo to serve as a government-sponsored research student at the Tokyo College of Music from 2000 to 2002, where he learned how to compose for Japanese instruments.
He earned his Ph.D. in music from the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, in 2006. The following year, he came to Texas A&M to teach in the Performance and Visual Studies program.
“I took those aspects of Japan and music and combined them into one synergetic pursuit,” he said. “I wanted to be a specialist in Japanese instruments, and I haven’t looked back.”
Regan was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to teach and research in Japan from September 2022 through August 2023. During his residency, he explored, taught music, gave presentations, performed concerts and conducted field research. This included lectures at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music in Kawasaki and the Research Institute for Traditional Japanese Music at the Kyoto City University of Arts. He also taught at Osaka University-Minoh Campus, Hokkaido University of Education, Kushiro campus and Tokyo College of Music.
At Senzoku Gakuen College of Music, Regan led a Japanese instruments ensemble class where students played chamber music in a small orchestra and performed two concerts. He taught a class in modern Japanese music and introduced students to Japanese and American composers. Regan said that his teaching process had its hurdles as he prepped for classes in Japanese.
“Even though I speak Japanese, I am not bilingual,” he said. “So, it always took more preparation. It took me five days to prepare to deliver a Japanese lecture.”
During his Fulbright experience, Regan had the opportunity to fulfill a 10-day residency at the University of Sydney in Australia through an affiliate program. He worked with 15 student composers and conducted research for a book he is writing titled “Soundscape of Japan: From Past to the Present,” about Japanese performing arts from the seventh century to the present day.
Life In Japan
Though life in Japan can be described as hectic — more than 37 million people live in the greater Tokyo area — Regan found calm amid the noise. In a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment located by a train station, Regan experienced convenience over bustle.
“In the time you walked from my apartment to the train station, there were three convenience stores, a grocery store, two bakeries, a Korean restaurant, two ramen places, a used bookstore, two drugstores, a sushi place and a small little neighborhood, with very little car traffic,” he said.
He visited Kyoto, a popular destination known for its cultural heritage, temples and performing arts spaces. The first concert he gave — at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan in October 2022 — was attended by more than 600 people.
Throughout the fall, Regan attended weekly concerts and participated in about 40, including a performance of a song cycle based on the haiku poetry of Matsuo Bashō at Tokyo Opera Center. He wrote about a dozen new works during his stay.
In August 2023, Regan was featured holding the shakuhachi on the cover of a national Japanese magazine called the Hōgaku Journal, which promotes up-and-coming artists and is an information source for traditional Japanese music. He calls it “the Rolling Stone of Japan.”
“I was the first non-Japanese person in history to be featured on the cover,” he said. “The people featured have the traditional Japanese title of ‘National Living Treasures,’ and others who have much more experience than me. I felt very validated and honored by being featured.”
‘A Moment Of Connection’
Of all the experiences he had in Japan, Regan said his most memorable was in February 2023, when he took a trip to Kushiro, Hokkaido. It was there he said he witnessed “a full-circle moment.”
When Regan first began studying Japanese instruments, his teachers emphasized a deep and profound relationship between Japanese music and nature.
“At the time, I didn’t know what they were talking about,” he said. “They would say things like, ‘Listen to this sound on the koto; doesn’t it sound like wind blowing through pine trees?’ It was abstract and simply didn’t make sense.”
He began making that connection in Kushiro, which is known as the snow country because of its snowy mountain ranges. There he visited the Kushiro marshlands, which protect an endangered species known as red-crowned cranes. Regan watched forest rangers throw birdfeed into the air twice a day, and the cranes — which mate for life — respond with a loud, gurgling sound.
This called to mind an anonymously composed shakuhachi piece titled “Nesting of the Cranes,” which Regan teaches in his Japanese Traditional Performing Arts course. The shakuhachi sounds emulate the cranes, he said, which brought a moment of realization about music and nature.
“For me to hear them in person, after playing and teaching that piece — and to be able to record their sounds and share that with my students, is a moment of connection that I’ve been waiting to make for 20 years,” he said. “That was the most surprising and moment of catharsis for me.”
Regan used his recordings of the cranes during lectures about the shakuhachi at Osaka University. The professor, Sayuri Inoue, had her students write haiku poems after hearing Regan perform.
“So now I have this collection of hundreds of haiku written by Japanese students in reaction to my lectures on the shakuhachi,” he said. “If there is any evidence for the power that cross-cultural educational experiences can have in bringing a foreign lecturer to inspire Japanese students to think about the preciousness of their own culture, that was it.”
‘We Will Be Transformed’
Regan is now set to bring the 2025 World Shakuhachi Festival to the Texas A&M campus. The quadrennial event debuted in Japan in 1994, and it was most recently held in London in 2018. This will be its first appearance in the United States in more than 20 years.
More than 230 visiting guest artists and participants have registered for the four-day event, which is centered around the Liberal Arts and Arts and Humanities Building. It features 11 concerts on campus and one in Round Top, more than 75 workshops and classes, three open-mic sessions, two competitions and a research symposium.
Regan was awarded a co-sponsorship grant from the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for the symposium. The discussion will be held 9 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. on April 16 in Room 300 of the Melbern G. Glasscock Building.
Tickets for concerts at Rudder Theatre and Festival Concert Hall in Round Top are available at the MSC Box Office website. Concerts in the Black Box Theater are free. To register as a participant and view the complete schedule, visit the World Shakuhachi Festival website.
“We will be transformed during this festival,” Regan said. “It’s an honor to be able to put this together for the global community of people in the United States, Europe and Japan — who have worked tirelessly for over two and a half years to bring this event here — with the intent to enrich the Texas A&M campus, Bryan-College Station, the Brazos Valley and beyond.”
