Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Lately I've been trying to get into the strange world of electric guitars. So far I'm basically nowhere but at least it has been a fun trip so far. While getting started with learning some basic notes and scales I noticed something interesting. A lot of people in the west learn music through some western instrument. Guitar is pretty typical I'd think. Most material I've seen teaches basics like C major scale as well as some major chords. However, I quickly found that while C major scale felt a bit foreign to me, I could easily play a piece like Sakura on guitar and even do some simple improvisations during it. I could even come up with a simple melody using the same notes used in that piece, namely Ro, Tsu meri, Re, U and Ri in shakuhachi terms. I came to realise that I had been using that scale for so long with shakuhachi that it felt very natural to me and I could somehow come up with melodies using it even though I had trouble with actually finding notes on the guitar.

Some time ago my father tried to play Sakura from notes. He had some trouble even though the piece itself isn't that difficult. The problem was that the progression in the piece wouldn't match his gut feeling of how the piece should go. I came to realise that over the course of playing different kinds of music we tend to stick to what we know and use that in various ways. To me, hearing and playing various japanese scales sounds quite natural and I can easily predict how some piece will go. If I'm forced to improvise something, odds are that I will automatically go for one of those scales without really thinking about it. Someone else with background in western music might go for C major scale or something equally western and play something using that.

I find it rather interesting that experience with one style of music translates to various habits in another. It sounds fairly obvious when phrased like this but actually seeing it happen with your own playing makes it that much more tangible. The same thing happened when my teacher played some improvised music with shakuhachi. Although he made up the melody itself, his playing still sounded very much like your average honkyoku since he was utilizing the same techniques, scales and transitions that he used every day. This experience taught me the importance of repeating the same honkyoku often. By playing those pieces over and over you slowly develop an intuitive feel for how the music should go and it becomes very natural to play it that way. Once you have that you can play pretty much anything while still maintaining that particular style for the music.

At first it seemed strange that nobody had really pointed out that this is why it is important to play honkyoku if you wish to develop that particular sound. Then again, odds are that people have tried to point it out but it's just one of those things that you need to figure out for yourself before it really sinks in. There is that difference between knowing something in theory and really understanding what it is all about. Figuring this out made me want to practice my honkyoku playing that much more.

Happy early summer to everyone.