Music

The 2025 World Shakuhachi Festival was a success. For four days in April, hundreds of shakuhachi artists and aficionados traveled from around the world to Aggieland to celebrate the shakuhachi — a traditional end-blown bamboo flute — and its hundreds of years of impact on music and culture in Japan and beyond.

Note: Because of rain on April 24, this event has been postponed to May 6 at 8:30 p.m. An evening of music and visuals influenced by the impact of natural disasters will be performed by faculty in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts on Thursday at 8:30 p.m. in the courtyard of the Liberal Arts and Arts and Humanities Building.

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.

Austin-based percussionist Ivan Trevino will join students and faculty members in the Music Performance program in a Percussion Ensemble Concert on April 14 at 7 p.m. The free concert in the Black Box Theater in the Liberal Arts and Arts and Humanities Building will feature a selection of works composed by Trevino, who is a professor of practice in percussion at the University of Texas at Austin.

Faculty members in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts will showcase their creative works in a new exhibition. The Faculty Biennial opens Thursday and continues through May 18 at the J. Wayne Stark Galleries in the Memorial Student Center. A reception will be held Thursday from 5:30 to 7 p.m., where faculty members will be on hand and refreshments will be served. To register, visit the RSVP link.

Faculty in the Texas A&M College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts showcased a wide variety of research during the 2025 Research and Creative Works Day. The third-annual spring symposium was held Feb. 3 at the Stella Hotel in Bryan, and included three keynote speakers and several performances by faculty members.

Innovation has been a consistent theme throughout Tim McLaughlin’s career, both in higher education and the visual effects industry. The Longview native’s degrees at Texas A&M University helped to take him to Industrial Light & Magic, where he played a major role in how digital creatures look and move in films including “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” “Mars Attacks!” and “Jumanji,” along with a prototype project for “Avatar.”

The Texas A&M University College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts will host the World Shakuhachi Festival April 17-20. Dr. Martin Regan, a professor in the Music Performance program, organized the festival, which will be held in Texas for the first time. The quadrennial event debuted in Japan in 1994, and it was most recently held in London in 2018.

The Institute for Applied Creativity in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts held its first LASER Talk Jan. 29 at the J. Wayne Stark Galleries in the Memorial Student Center.

Aggieland Saturday — Texas A&M University’s largest open-house event — returns on Feb. 8, inviting prospective students and their families to explore everything Aggieland has to offer.