Artist of the Knight - Michael Doherty

This is the sixth episode of PPLD's Artist of the Knight Program.  This series aims to provide library patrons with a glimpse into creatives in the Pikes Peak Region.  This episode features music and an interview with local musician Michael Doherty.

Michael Andrew Doherty is a shakuhachi player/craftsman, composer, and percussionist, who works at the intersections of traditional shakuhachi music performance, ritual art, visual art, writing, meditation, epistemology, and silence. His creative studio, Blue Cloud Mountain, is on the side of a mountain outside of Palmer Lake, Colorado. Michael has studied shakuhachi with many foremost masters of the shakuhachi, but has spent the most time with Marco Lienard (NYC), Kiku Day (Denmark) and Michael Gould (Wyoming). Artistically, Michael is interested in creating a doorway, thinning the veil to a liminal space or “non-ordinary reality”, for the listener or viewer. In this way his art can be seen as both a ritual tool as well as a musical piece or painting. Having been heavily influenced by the American Modernists, and John Cage in particularly, most of his art is related to silence in some way, and is informed also by nearly 30 years of meditative experience and with the philosophies of Zen and Tao.