Going Off Book

Yūgure no Kyoku is one of the programatic pieces in the Kinko-ryū repertoire, and one of my favorite honkyoku pieces. The title means The Bell at Twilight, and its composer is not known. It features a perfect example of the challenge facing players who want learn this music without a teacher. To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at some notation.

Shakuhachi music is written using a simple system of katakana characters—a Japanese alphabet used primarily for writing phonetically—to represent each note. The music is written from top to bottom and read from right to left.

Content warning: Colleen read this brog post and thought it was like trying to decipher an organic chemistry textbook so a.) my apologies for such a deep dive into the weeds and b.) you are forgiven if you skip this week if you’re not a diehard shakuhachi enthusiast.

Here is an section of the Yūgure score. We’re just going to focus on the highlighted section:

The characters in black are the notes starting with tsu, followed by a dash which indicates a repeat of the previous note. Next we see tsu again, now followed by a series of dashes, smaller to larger. The last note in this sequence is re. To the right of our first tsu note, in red is the character ryo, which is what we call the lower octave on the shakuhachi (some schools say otsu but that is not in my vernacular). To the left, it says karu meaning the note is played without any embellishments. To the right of the repeated tsu is written meru which means we’re now playing tsu with the ring finger of our right hand covering ¾ of the hole. To the left, it says re ni suru which is a very unusual level of detail to include. This is followed again by tsu, but with no indication of meru or karu (which we often call meri or kari), and the small-to-large dashes finishing with re.

The sequence as written would be played like this:

In reality, it should be played like this:

Even trying to emulate a recording, there is a lot left to interpretation without a guide. To the casual observer, it may be reasonable to question the importance of playing it correctly, as long as the sound is a close enough approximation. It’s a slippery slope to say the traditional technique isn’t important.

If we were to write this indicating every change, it should say tsu, re(meri), re, chi(meri), and tsu(meri). Not to mention the embellishments like suri which is the slurred transition where the pitch is briefly raised between tsu and re, and again between re and tsu. When discussing the pattern of repeated tsu(meri), I like to describe it less as something slowing down, and rather the space in between the notes getting longer. It’s a small distinction, but one that better illustrates the approach that should be taken here. We often see this phrase in reverse as well, in which case the method is the same in reverse.

We could of course write all that in the margins, but I believe there is real value in the process of imprinting the nuance into one’s core understanding of a piece of music. When we sing a song we’ve committed to memory, it is far more evocative than when we read words off a page. (IMHO)

There have been some great books written about shakuhachi, and there are a few good demos on YouTube, but if you try to go that way, a lot of the beauty of the music is going to fall through the cracks. So, if you’ve been considering learning the shakuhachi, I urge you to seek out a teacher. Enrollment for my in-person beginner shakuhachi class in Seattle, starting January 7th is open, and I’m looking forward to getting rolling!

More anon,
Hanz