Monday, January 26, 2015

Shaku

What is long and cylindrical; has both ends chopped off; is made from one of the worlds most common plants; has a tendency to self-destruct; can take months to make a sound; is made by many of the musicians that play them; has nearly indecipherable music; and in the right hands sounds like the wind, like nature itself — the shakuhachi.

The most common size of a shakuhachi is 1.8 shaku. Shaku is an ancient Japanese unit of length, approximately one foot. Hachi is eight sun (another ancient unit) or tenths of a shaku. So, this gives you an idea of how long one is, about 21 inches.

I cannot remember how my relationship with the shakuhachi started. It was the late 1970’s and I was back in college after a stint as a letter carrier. I found myself at Southern Illinois University with few friends during the worst winter on record. As opposed to the endless amount of student loans available now, I lived frugally. Most of my time was spent in the bedroom studying. That is, except for the time in secular meditation, and in an exasperating nightly ritual blowing into a two foot long piece of bamboo.

So, how did I find this flute? Let me digress, remember, this was long before the Internet. In the library basement at Southern Illinois University, the beginnings of the Internet were percolating but there was no world wide web to go shopping on. There resided plasma monitors with remarkably poor resolution, which were connected to a system from the University of Illinois at Champaign, called Plato. I would reserve a ½ hour or so on a monitor to break up my evening studies and to work with several rudimental programs: simple anatomy and a typing instructional program that I never completed.

But this has nothing to do with the shakuhachi. Wherever I saw the ad (it might have been in the Whole Earth Catalog) I bought into its notion of blowing Zen and purchased one. It turned out to be in the key of D, not that I knew what that meant. I still have it. It might have cost $100. A large amount of money considering I was to spend the next five years living on an average of $2000 a year.

A shakuhachi is a pentatonic instrument in a chromatic world. It has the distinction of music written in katakana, top to bottom, and right to left. The notation represents how the five holes are covered, or not, and the change in the angle of breath blown across its slashed pop-bottle like opening.

An accomplished player can sound notes from near D above middle C on up for two, and even three octaves. To complicate playing it even more, since each flute is simply a piece of bamboo, they all have a different character. But in this case, at least for me, frustration has lead to endearment.

Back at the university, I spent a few minutes of my precious study time learning the unique music and trying to produce a sound on the flute. Now over 30 years later, I have rediscovered the shakuhachi. My stable consists of the original student grade bamboo flute, a maple replica from the 80’s, and a recently purchased vintage thick-walled Japanese flute from the 1930s.

Each one requires different technique and they each have a slightly different pitch. And as for character, the thin-walled flute is high and reedy; the wooden one is low and sonorous; and the vintage flute . . . well, I am not sure. Not sure because I do not possess the talent to play it to its full capacity.

I have been assured that if I devote my life to practice, in about three years, I should begin to show some promise. If three years is the estimate, I am probably looking at a decade. And as for the decades I have already devoted to it, I am close to mastering the Japanese equivalent of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ or ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody’.

Breath control, timing, consistency, and stamina all need work. Then maybe I will think about artistic expression. Or perhaps the point is just to blow. Let the earth’s atmosphere circulate through my respiratory tract into and out of the flute.

I think of chanoyu’s expression ichigo, ichie (one time, one meeting), and then realize the shakuhachi’s is one breath, one note.

January 2015