Saturday, December 24, 2016

Stalling

A shakuhachi presents the player with many unique challenges. It is a pentatonic instrument masquerading as a chromatic one. This is made possible by its somewhat primitive mouthpiece. It is simply a pipe with a diagonal cut at one end. This characteristic allows the player to blow air over the cut end at various angles.

Blow straight across and get the designated note, tilt your head down and the note flattens, tilt your head up or back and the note sharpens. This along with partially covered holes allows a shakuhachi to achieve about two and a half octaves on a good day.

There are other ways to manipulate the sound. Change the embouchure, blow harder and softer, purse or relax the lips, move the head side to side, exhaling quick and strong before settling in on a note, striking a hole between sounding the same note, all these and more alter the sound.

Often when moving between octaves the note will disappear. I can attest that this is vexing. It took many months when I first started to play to get a note to sound and so, to lose one is frustrating. I wonder where did it go and why can I not get it back.

Once, while visiting Kyoto for a tea ceremony event I sought out a shakuhachi maker. It was a long walk to get there and once there, we (I dragged Charlotte with me) could not find the address. I looked and looked; there was no one to ask even if I could speak Japanese. Finally, when just about to give up, I saw the only two characters in Japanese that I know — Shaku-Hachi on a small sign outside what looked like a private home.

We walked in from the street down a long pathway and were confronted by a shoji screen sliding door. There were no markings or doorbell. I summoned the courage to open the door and a bell sounded. It was the correct place; there were a few shakuhachi stored in a cabinet.

To make a long story short, the beneficent owner came out to greet us. I explained that I was not sure why I was there but I felt I should be. He stood up, walked out of the room, and returned with an armful of beautifully crafted shakuhachi.

He beckoned me to play one. I knew there was no turning back, so I picked one up but could not get a sound out of it. My face turned bright red — I started to hyperventilate — It was all over. Taking pity on me, a short lesson followed, I made a few squeaks, thanked him profusely, and bid farewell.

Once out on the street, I could not understand what happened and then I thought about stalling a small aircraft. In 1976, after I finished ground school I logged 22 hours in a Cessna 150, a small single engine airplane. At the time, for about fifty dollars (including the instructor’s fees) I could fly around the Southside of Chicago for an hour. This was when Midway Airport was in limbo. There were no commercial flights and so the airport was populated with flight training schools, small charter airlines, and private pilots.

It was interesting to takeoff and land on Midway’s long runways with this tiny plane. Even now as a passenger, I think about landing that runt of a plane while watching the approach out the window of a large passenger jet. The few hours I spent in the air taught me many important lessons about piloting everything from motorcycles to boats. There is a strategy to flying that readily translates into other modes of transport.

Stalling and recovering the aircraft was practiced each time I flew. This is done in two different modes. One is with full take off power, and the other in slow flight as when landing. These maneuvers are practiced with enough altitude to ensure that there is time to recover, for when a plane stalls it drops like a rock.

What makes the plane stall is the lack of air flow over the wings. Once the airflow is disrupted there is no longer any lift to support the weight of the plane and down it goes. No amount of prior discussion or study prepared me for feeling of helplessness as the plane suddenly dropped twisting out of the sky, but that is what flight instructors are for. After a few hours of stalling — I was no Captain Scully — I could recover and go on to finish the lesson without much anxiety.

A shakuhachi has a similar trait. When in inexperienced hands it is easy to stall the airflow across the mouthpiece. It is common for beginning players to take weeks just to obtain and sustain a note. Due to the peculiarities of the angled mouthpiece, transitioning from one octave to the next, whether up or down the scale can make a note drop out of the sky. The flow of air becomes chaotic and stalls, leaving one in the same position as a toddlers trying to blow bubbles for the first time.

Listen to a virtuoso and hear how they use this seeming flaw to their advantage. It is what gives the shakuhachi its characteristic sound: serene but with an underlying anxiety, always on the verge of disaster. In the hands of skilled players, the chaos is controlled to convey the message that beautiful sounds still live in a natural world.

This footing in the natural, dare I say primordial, world is what draws us into the sound. It is what compels a player to continue to play despite the stalled notes, the breathless light-headedness, the hours of learning the its odd tablature. So next time, when listening to a shakuhachi, listen with intent to the breath’s flow and not only the music…therein rests its magic.

December 2016