Notes on Notes
from right to left: Kodo II, Kodo III, Kodo IV, Kodo V
It used to be a point of great shame for me that I not only didn’t go to college, but never actually finished high school. Academics were not my strong suit; I struggled from elementary school day 1 on. The industrial model of education in the United States was designed for me to fail.
When I was eight, I took piano lessons but couldn’t grasp 5-line notation. What I would do instead was memorize the music I was supposed to play which was torture. The music my teacher gave me wasn’t what I would call music at all, but rather these inane little jingles. When she finally gave me something with a bit more meat, it didn’t help my process and still had to learn by ear, which I kept from her. I was learning Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, turning pages roughly where I though I should. At a certain point, she stopped me and said show me on the page where you are and the jig was up. She left and didn’t come back, and I didn’t play music again until I sat down with my father, nearly ten years later.
the scene of the crime. (also pictured: E Ten Raku, Kodo IV)
Kinko-ryu shakuhachi notation—the shakuhachi music with which my family is associated—didn’t give me fits in the same way. Or at all, really. It’s written top to bottom and read right to left and is based on the katakana alphabet. The letters ro, tsu, re, chi, ri, hi, ha, and u are used for notes; ru and ra, for repeating notes with alternate techniques.
i.e.
A brief aside on Japanese language:
Japanese is both written and spoken in syllables with n (or sometimes m) as the lone consonant. The vowel sounds (a, i, u, e, o) never vary, and consonants are added to those vowels. In other words, if you’re looking for McDonald’s in Japan, you would in theory ask for Ma-Ku-Do-Na-Ru-Do. (In doing so, you would also be committing the cardinal sin of eating at McDonald’s in one of the world’s great Meccas of cuisine.)
I was fluent in shakuhachi notation a full year before I could speak even basic Japanese, which I didn’t study in earnest until I lived in Tokyo. It’s still impossible for me to parse music from western notation, whereas ro-tsu-re took me three days.
Strangely, I haven’t been able to apply a similar technique in Irish music. I’ve tried writing out tunes with d, e, f#, g, etc. but it doesn’t translate. All the Irish songs and tunes I know (or knew) I learned by ear, and have to play from memory. I’m certainly not unique in that way, as it’s the prevailing method for most Irish musicians I’ve ever met. But it means I’m forgetting tunes at an alarming rate. Itzhak Pearlman says if you practice something slowly, you’ll forget it slowly; if you practice quickly you forget it quickly. I’m forgetting tunes faster than I learned them which makes me a little sad. Although in my case, this is mostly from disuse as I haven’t returned to Irish music in the post-Pandemic world.
me, trying to remember how the tune goes, Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary. (Elly is always just cool.)
I’m sure some linguist out there could explain to me why learning written music using Japanese was so much easier than learning western staff notation. It seems there is something in the syllabary that my brain can process that it can’t in lines and dots.
That time when my piano teacher walked out on me for not reading the music was not the last time I was admonished for my inability to understand staff. That continues to this day; a kind of academic piety that I can’t relate to. And is a topic for another day.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish scraping toxic 100 year-old adhesive from my living room floor…
More anon,
Hanz