LA Festival Bridges Gap Between Art and Music
On Sunday, June 29, the VEFA Gallery in Torrance will host AKIHO [un]framed, the culminating event of the 2025 TAPS LA Music Festival—a program that, in just a few short years, has emerged as a significant platform for contemporary percussion performance and education.
At the center of the evening is Andy Akiho, the GRAMMY-nominated composer and performer whose work challenges the limits of genre, instrumentation, and form. Akiho will perform alongside fellows from the Ted Atkatz Percussion Seminar (TAPS), a selective summer program led by former Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal percussionist Ted Atkatz.
Akiho performing Aka with 2024 Fellow Connor Willits and returning TAPS Fellow Yun-Chen Chou. Chou will be performing at Akiho [un]framed with Akiho once again!
The program’s title, [un]framed, speaks not only to the gallery space in which it’s set but to the way Akiho’s music resists categorization. His compositions often integrate steel pan, found objects, and virtuosic rhythms into pieces that are as intellectually rigorous as they are viscerally engaging. The result is music that feels equally at home in a conservatory or contemporary art space—perfectly matched to the industrial openness of VEFA Gallery.
Colburn Conservatory student Edric Salazar performing at TAPSurreal, a recent collaboration event between TAPS and VEFA Gallery.
TAPS fellows—young professional percussionists from across the country—will have spent two weeks in Long Beach studying under leading artists in the field. Their performance with Akiho marks the culmination of their time at the festival, a final collaborative statement that reflects both their own emerging voices and the influence of a composer known for expanding the vocabulary of percussion.
TAPS Fellows Tanner Dunaway and Yu-Tong (Eudora) Tsai picking out pitched wood planks and ceramic bowls for Akiho’s Haiku 2. This piece also requires a pan and wood spoon, and pitched metal pipes.
Returning TAPS Fellow Kai Gray testing out his instruments for Akiho’s Pillar VII, requiring 19 pitched metal pipes, a cigar box, and various glass bottles.
While the evening serves as a capstone for the TAPS LA Music Festival, it also highlights a broader shift in classical music programming—one that embraces interdisciplinary space, emerging talent, and works that ask performers and audiences alike to rethink what a concert experience can be.