Tra / di / tion

A former student of my father’s, in the years just before I started playing, recently resumed his shakuhachi studies, now with me. He’s a folklorist, which is to say, he studies and teaches the very thing that has given my life meaning; tradition and cultural heritage. As we talked, I mentioned some of the challenges we face as stewards of tradition—specifically, how we can preserve tradition, while not keeping it under glass so as to suffocate it. In response to this he said:

…tradition is a process we use to create the future out of the past. In this sense it is a creative act. We make choices to follow what we have learned as a way of both connecting to those who have come before us and by doing so, informing what we do with meaning. This process generates a sense of continuity over time.

This has been going around and around in my head ever since. It is the most succinct explanation of what I’ve tried to do for nearly my entire life. The preservation of tradition isn’t necessarily difficult. We have every manner of technology to record and playback examples of traditional music. But to quote one of my folk music heroes, Martin Carthy (The Guardian, 2011):

I regard tradition as progressive, and a traditional song as a progressive force, because it is concerned with the continuity of things. Good folk music is like me holding my grandchildren and wanting to know more about my great, great, great uncle... I see his fingers on the uilleann pipes, and I see my father's hands and my grandfather's hands.

The continuity of folk music is similar, because it is also our continuity. [Folk music] is not an archive. If you see it as that, it becomes like a butterfly in a glass case. Folk music has to live and breathe …this stuff is alive, we must claim it, use it.

While shakuhachi may not fall exactly within the bounds of folk music with a capital “F”, it ticks enough of the same boxes and shares plenty of DNA.

We have archives for a reason. They undoubtedly serve a purpose, but they can’t maintain traditions. I often caution against using archival recordings as anything more than just one tool in your arsenal. Recordings have obvious value, but they only manage to capture the artist in one moment, one mood, one frame of their existence—freeze-dried, like the butterfly in the glass case Carthy mentioned.

This is why I try to impart in my students the importance of their own artistic expression. Learn and understand this craft as it was taught to me by my father and so on, but try not to spin out trying to carbon copy every single nuance. If people come away from my lessons only able to mimic, and sound and play exactly like I do, I have failed in my intent.

Have I wished I could play exactly like my father? Of course I have. But that’s a part of what he brought to this tradition: something to aspire to. I do sound very similar to him, but we are unquestionably different. If I sounded exactly like him, and played every piece he taught me note for note as he did, I believe he would have been profoundly disappointed. I would go so far as to say if I played everything exactly the same way every time I played, it would be a disappointment. I strive for consistency, but only within the confines of any given performance; not over the long timeline of my life and the generations that came before me.

All this underscores the importance of the teacher/student relationship. The fluid nature of traditional music is the most laid bare when we attempt transmission. Good students will recognize this and accept that their teacher’s approach to some particular phrase or motif may—and likely will—change over the course of their time together, because the teacher—like their student—is still evolving. This sounds like a cop-out and a flimsy excuse for a faulty memory or an out-and-out mistake (which to be sure on occasion, it is). But it should be seen as a beautiful part of this discipline.

I’ll give you an example of this in action. This is a phrase from Igusa Reibō which I was teaching today. When we got to this part, my student pointed out that I played a similar phrase differently in another piece.

Here it is, played two ways

The difference being, in the first instance, the shorter repeated notes are played by moving the index finger; in the second, the quick repeats are achieved by shaking the flute and disrupting the airflow. The second method is slightly gentler, while the former is more staccato—both are acceptable. And to be clear, these are subtle distinctions; perhaps you won’t even readily hear the difference between these two approaches. The concept is the same, it just varies in execution.

It hopefully serves as an example of what informs a particular style, in this case the Araki-style, at an atomic level, and the importance and burden of bearing tradition. Like I said, I don’t ask that you play exactly like me; I do hope I can impart these techniques, even if your own interpretation takes you in another direction.

More anon,
Hanz

On Composing…

Words