Gong Explorations

A Four-Day Immersive Course

10:00am-5pm Daily
Blue Lake Sanctuary
14599 West End Road Arcata, CA 95521

Full Workshop - $600
Workshop - by Date $150

Gong Explorations is a four-day immersive course exploring the expressive, technical, and creative possibilities of the gong. This course marks a return to the Arcata area, building on ideas, practices, and shared musical language developed through past workshops with the local community, while remaining fully open to participants of all experience levels.

The focus of Gong Explorations is curiosity-driven learning—deepening one’s relationship with the gong through technique, touch, tone, rhythm, phrasing, and listening, while expanding into group interplay, dynamics, transitions, composition, and spontaneous music-making. The course emphasizes exploration over prescription, offering tools and frameworks that support both personal voice and collective music-making.

Across four gong-filled days, participants will engage in focused studies, guided group exercises, and open-ended explorations. The intention is to build fluency and confidence while keeping the process playful, attentive, and alive.

⸻

What We’ll Explore

Technique & Touch

Mallet control, striking approaches, sustaining and dampening, muting, and articulation—developing sensitivity to how small physical changes shape tone, response, and clarity.

Tone & Sound Exploration

Drawing out overtones, working with decay and resonance, and exploring density, volume, and texture. Learning how sound unfolds over time and how to listen into those changes.

Rhythm, Pulse & Phrasing

Exploring how rhythm lives inside the gong—from slow, spacious gestures to repeating figures and subtle pulses that emerge within sustained sound.

Dynamics & Transitions

Moving between textures, energies, and musical ideas using fades, cuts, builds, drops, and layered transitions. Understanding how music moves and transforms over time.

Composition & Musical Structures

Exploring composition as an evolving process rather than a fixed outcome. Participants will work with simple forms, modular ideas, short and long-form structures, and compositional frameworks that can be adapted for solo playing or group settings. Emphasis is placed on clarity, flow, and intentional decision-making within open musical forms.

Group Interplay & Spontaneous Composition

Guided ensemble playing, conduction-based exercises, and collective listening practices that build responsiveness, trust, and musical conversation within a group.

Listening & Musical Awareness

Deep listening to the gong, the room, the ensemble, and oneself as a foundation for meaningful and intentional music-making.

⸻

Course Flow

The four days are structured as a gradual unfolding:
• Early Dates emphasize fundamentals, sound relationships, and technique
• Middle Dates focus on interaction, transitions, and compositional awareness
• Later Dates integrate these elements into extended group explorations, shared musical forms, and collaborative compositions

Exercises range from precise technical studies to open-ended explorations and compositions, allowing space to experiment, take risks, learn through experience, and have fun.

⸻

Overall Intention

Gong Explorations is about continuing a shared inquiry into the gong as a living, responsive instrument. Rather than presenting a fixed method, the course offers tools, techniques, and experiences that support individual expression, collective music-making, and long-term creative growth.

This is a space to deepen skill without losing wonder, reconnect with familiar ideas, discover new possibilities, and explore the joy, power, and mystery of playing the gong—together.