Shakuhachi and Breath

 This is from an exchange I had with a friend, talking about breathing techniques. Maybe you'll find it useful...

About legato / staccato / vibrato / tremolo, etc.: 

 

With the western flute, you know that we use lots of "tonguing" (staccato), and a tremolo using the breath. These techniques are generally not used in older shakuhachi music. However, some schools use a very extreme tremolo (that is, komi-buki), so there are exceptions. Same with staccato. Shakuhachi basically doesn't use tonguing, but there are some cases where you'll stop the breath and then start it again - for example, ha-u often sounds good this way. Part of this is because this can be a difficult transition, since the breath needs to switch from strong (ha) to a more precise, gentle one (u) when you play ha-u in the higher register.

The general rule, though, is that each phrase is played with a steady breath, and any changes in notes are done with the fingers. It's kind of like meditation here: you want to maintain a smooth, steady, longish out-breath; the notes are kind of a way of decorating and playing with that breath, but the breath is perhaps more important than the notes. So: legato.

Vibrato is sometimes used. You can do so by moving the shakuhachi, or moving your head up and down. When komuso were wearing "tengai" (upside-down baskets) to cover their heads, they couldn't move their heads without jiggling the basket about, so most of this effect was done using the shakuhachi, and probably more sparingly than it is used today. However, we don't have baskets on our heads, so either is fine. Sometimes I like a vibrato, but it's also good to practice a very plain, steady breath. It's easy to hide faults in our playing by using vibrato all the time, so I think it's good to use it only minimally.

As for the "legato" breath:

There are several types. Kinpu-ryu uses "sasabuki." Sasabuki refers to sasa-gusa, or bamboo grass. The shape of the leaf starts in a point, then grows wider, then gets smaller again. So with the breath: it comes out of silence, gets stronger, then leads back into silence again. Seien-ryu pieces originally used "bo-buki," or "stick breath." In this case, there is no amplitude modulation at all; you suddenly start at full volume, maintain it through the breath, and then suddenly stop. When Higuchi Taizan, a major figure in Fuke playing / Myoan-ryu, edited some of the Seien-ryu pieces (including sanya, shizu, etc.), he played them in his own style, which I like better than the original so I follow it. He used "kusabi-buki," or "wedge breath." This breath follows the image of a bell: it starts at full volume, then gradually fades out. For the majority of pieces, this is how I like to play.

With the recent COVID-19 business, at Hon-on Shakuhachi nothing is changing. I know that the same is not true for all of my friends, however, as some are losing jobs, and my own adjunct teaching is a little uncertain as well, since it's not clear whether classes will actually begin on time. It's nice to see everyone cooperating to keep the spread to a minimum, though. Some grocery stores here (I'm currently visiting family in NJ, hoping my return flight doesn't get canceled!) are keeping special early hours for elderly customers. 

There are many other reasons for hope as well. As stock prices fall, and people buy all the toilet paper (what!? why toilet paper? why not rice?) it's easy to get uneasy. In recent days, a few things have been echoing about in my mind:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and theives break in and steal - for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

I think this is something close to what Zen people intuited in the heart sutra, that everything is in a sense "empty." Tangible stuff dies. Form is emptiness. Don't set your life on it. On the other hand, there are things that we can't see - God, love, life - that last forever. Set your heart on things that perish, and when they start perishing, you get uneasy, because all that you have is set to go away. Now is a good time to set our hearts on things that last: "treasures in heaven." Jesus is my treasure, and I'm his. You are God's own "treasure in heaven." If you see all the potential and actual evil in you're heart, it's enough. All that is forgiven. You are loved, and you can love. Love invades everything that you do (I wish I could say I was doing this completely!). Now we can begin to say, "emptiness is form." The unseen breaks into the world, and infuses transitory things with eternal meaning. Here's another:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. GOD, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.

A Hebrew poet-prophet wrote this some thousands of years ago. Faith creates a sort of insane endurance in you, where you can be happy even though everything around you says you shouldn't, because your heart, your mind, is set on things that can never be shaken. This is not an attitude reserved only for super-saints and mountain-dwelling masters. It's available to anyone. I don't know if I've attained it myself, but if I do have it, it's not because of anything I've done - it's like getting a present, and then opening it. Easy enough for a child - maybe even easier than for grown-ups! Here's the last one:

Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine. The light of your presence is shining on us, Lord! You have put joy in my heart, more than others have when their grain and new wine abound. In peace I will lie down and sleep, because You alone make me live in safety.

This is from a psalm that I sing most nights just before going to bed. Some look to good things and good circumstances for their joy. When I find my joy fading, it's a sign to me that I need to find something better to pay attention to. Things - food and wine - are very good to enjoy, as long as we can enjoy it with a joy that outlasts them. Things never bring peace. When I set my mind on things, they bring anxiety - the knowledge that I don't have the power to keep them. True joy lets us navigate things freely. When they come, we enjoy them. When they go, we let go. We may have some sadness there, too. In the end, we have to let go of our own lives, and those of people we love, too. We love them, but we know that we can't keep them. Things get uncertain, and we get anxious. It's good, I think, if we can have someone Good to trust our lives with. When it's impossible to believe that God is real and is good, maybe we just need to believe it anyway. Living as if it were true makes it much more believable (because it actually is true).

These are not things that I've attained to completely; they're just things that I set my heart on in the morning and during the day, as I notice my mind wandering to places of fear or worry. 

Hitoyogiri Rhythms

I've been reading through hitoyogiri manuals from early and mid-Edo era Japan. In case you don't know, the hitoyogiri is considered to be the predecessor to the shakuhachi, and was actually called by the same name - shakuhachi - on account of its length: in this case, isshaku hachibu instead of isshaku hassun. (1.08 shaku instead of 1.8 shaku). The two share a lot in common, and I've been growing increasingly fond of this smaller, simpler (?), older flute.

From Shichiku Taizen:

Take care to follow form in terms of fingering, but don't get caught up in following a particular rhythm. You should play "ウエフエ" [a common phrase beginning many classical hitoyogiri solo pieces] without long or short. If you lengthen the next notes, then the end [of the phrase] will be short; again, if you make the end longer, then the beginning ends up short. Play so as to forget what lies ahead, so as to not know what came before. Straining to blow too hard is bad, too.

If you're not careful, this can sound like the author is saying to blow every note with the same length - but that would go against what he says at the beginning: don't get caught up in following a particular rhythm. The point is just to play the note your playing, until its finished. Once the note is finished, don't keep playing it. Don't stop it before it's over, either. Both cases are examples of dwelling on what came before or over-anticipating what comes next. You have to get to know the piece, feel how it likes to be played, and be present to it.

Shakuhachi is the same. It's about listening. 

Listen to everything. When you are present as you play, even "wrong" notes sound right. It's not about how you play, in terms of techniques and specific timing. It's about who is playing. When you play, and you are listening, and you are around people who are listening, your playing changes. It's alive. When no one is listening, maybe the birds and trees are. This changes your playing, too. When no one is listening, and birds and trees aren't listening, God is still listening. When I'm not aware of anyone listening, I usually stop playing, and just listen. 

深夜 Shinya - the dark night of the soul.

I've had mixed feelings about this shakuhachi piece for a while. I played it at a concert once, admittedly not having much of a grasp of the piece's intent, though I had been playing it for about 15 years. At the time, I had taken it as a portrait of the various activities of night - silence, bug sounds, etc.

A man who was taking lessons from me at the time wrote to me afterward with his impressions. For Shinya, he pictured demons dancing on a distant shore, preparing mischief. 

This threw me off. It wasn't what I had intended with the piece at all. Granted, these old pieces are designed to lay hearts bare, both that of the player and that of the listener. What he heard wasn't necessarily what I was playing... but his comments touched on something - there was an aspect to the piece that I still didn't get. I put it aside, and didn't play it much at all for a few years after.

I was at the World Shakuhachi Festival this year, mainly to translate for some of my own teachers who were giving lectures. I jumped at the chance to translate for Atsuya Okuda, who was leading a workshop on his version of Sanya. During the workshop, he said that we shouldn't be too literal in interpreting the title. For me, as soon as I heard this it seemed so stupidly obvious that I have no idea how I missed it all these years. It's not about bug sounds over the backdrop of a still night. It's about the dark night of the soul.

Okuda-sensei said it was about the complex condition of the heart before enlightenment - struggle, right thinking, distractions, falsehood, faith, all mixed in together. 

In St. John of the Cross' poem of the same title, the dark night of the soul is a period of darkness - of struggle, or perhaps a darkening of the senses wherein God seems to be far away - that leads eventually into new depths of intimacy with God. Our senses seem to be dead and passionless, and God seems to be absent - but this is only because we are being refined, broken, and molded into something new, someone capable of containing the depths of God, the love of Christ. Love is not something we are naturally able to feel, in its true form. God is hidden in his light, which looks like darkness from where we stand - "Clouds of deep darkness surround him." Here we learn what faith and love are - a faith that holds on without seeing, a love that is faithful without being able to feel.

At the same time, this doesn't quite fit the character of Shinya... not completely, anyway. It expresses peace, but also struggle. It's not about a period of not being able to see God as it is about the complex or confused state of the soul. Jesus' words in his midnight conversation with Nicodemus come to mind:

For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

I think Shinya is about exposing your heart to the light - all the good, all the bad, all the confusion, just as it is. From Psalm 139:

even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.


God shines in the darkness.

Faith is the only way through. When our wrongs, our shame, our failings tempt us to despair, we turn our gaze away from ourselves to Jesus. When things are going wrong and it seems like we won't have "enough" (friends, or money, or approval, or whatever), we exercise faith in God who provides, and act as if we have plenty (because we do, actually). When our old, dead self flares up, we just keep going. When we can't see, we trust that we are seen by our Father who is good. 

This is what Shinya is expressing: faith mixed with fear, goodness mixed with unwanted evil, vision mixed with blindness. This is a piece for dark nights, for laying the soul bare before God, trusting God with everything that's going on inside. As the earth turns, darkness passes and turns to light. There's nothing we can do to speed up the process, but we can be present through it, with the One who is always present to us.