Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

This is a great question, Karmajampa and I also hope someone can shed a bit of light on the topic. (Brian, that link to komuso.com has a list of the schools, but for the most part gives no more info than a list a pieces when you select one.)

Zak -- jinashi size queen

You are a repository of useful detail Edward, but if Tom Deever can't be sure then perhaps it doesn't matter. What he says about customizing the blow end for the individual player is interesting, that's how I feel also.

Komuso.com gave me good perspective on the whole school situation, I think I would have to have been there to know their individual styles. I notice that many schools were initiated after a fall-out between teacher and student (Succumb to Ego!). Perhaps there is no substantial difference, they fundamentally taught Shakuhachi and at some point the student leaves the nest.

I wonder how long it will be before we see a Western school take form, the Riley Rye perhaps.

Kel.

Thanks for the great reference, Edosan, and your two cents, Perry. Without going into the differences in flutes, what are you observations of the differences between Kinko and Dokyoku honkyoku?

Zak -- jinashi size queen

Definitions...it's hard to know where to begin.  The oldest shakuhachi pieces around today, in historical terms and perhaps in terms of sounding like what the original pieces sounded like, are probably the pieces in the Meian or Myoan repertoire; they're simpler musically than the Kinko pieces.  Much of the original repertory of the Meian school has been lost and Meian players are much fewer in number than Kinko or Tozan players.  The Meian school is referred to as a school but it seems to be more of a collection of various traditions which have managed to survive and not  be integrated into the more organized traditions such as Kinko or Tozan. The Meian school is the only one which still considers the shakuhachi to be primarily a religious instrument or hoki, though there are of course members of the other schools who stress the spiritual side of the flute.  Kurosawa Kinko was a komuso in the 18th century who was interested in organizing the komuso pieces, and he collected and notated about thirty of those early honkyoku and modified them to some degree; he added those to the three 'traditional' or 'original'  honkyoku and depending on the branch of Kinko there are anywhere from 32 to 36 pieces which became the standard Kinko repertoire. 

There are no Tozan honkyoku from the days of the komuso as the Fuke sect was outlawed before Nakao Tozan developed his school, so the so-called honkyoku of the Tozan school started off with pieces which were created by Nakao Tozan himself; obviously he took some principles from the Kinko school but the patterns in Tozan honkyoku are further modified from the patterns repeated in the Kinko repertoire.  According to Eliot Weisgarber, there are "three hundred different patterns or 'cells' in the Kinko honkyoku (p. 318, The Honkyoku of the Kinko-Ryu: Some Principles of Its Organization).  Nakao Tozan opened a shakuhachi teaching studio in 1896 and according to Edo Period scholar Yuko Kamisango, began composing his own music in 1904, those compositions which would become the 'honkyoku' of the Tozan school; later, other composers' pieces were accepted into the Tozan repertoire.  So the Tozan honkyoku are clearly inventions of the early 20th century, making them quite distinct in character from the Kinko honkoku which were created centuries earlier though modified by Kurosawa Kinko in the 18th century.

After the demise of the Fuke sect during the beginning of the Meiji Period, the various shakuhachi schools which sprang up strictly regulated the transmission of the pieces, with the result that each school had something of a limited repertory; in recent years those barriers between different schools have been breaking down somewhat because of the easy availability of information and because of the growing number of students who pick up pieces from more than one tradition.  There were many more original honkyoku than the pieces that were selected for inclusion by Kurosawa Kinko back in the 18th century, something which one has to keep in mind when considering the pieces in the Watazumi Doso style.  According to my understanding, Watazumi Doso traveled throughout Japan and gathered pieces from various of the surviving Fuke temples that had continued to pass pieces down even after the Fuke sect had been outlawed and he referred to his pieces as dokyoku (melodies of the way); he was very radical in that he rejected all the formalities of the official shakuhachi groups, claimed he had no teachers, and developed his own way of training the breath and playing the pieces he adopted.  He didn't even refer to shakuhachi as shakuhachi but called it hochiku, playing a more 'natural' ji-nashi flute.  Probably someone in the dokyoku tradition can give us more specific and accurate information on those developments. 

Back to Tozan and Kinko...The Tozan ryu took ideas from Western music and tried to integrate them with the Japanese music tradition.  Today it is continues to survive as one big organization, with the leadership still coming from the Nakao Tozan line, whereas Kinko is a number of smaller organizations each with its own guild leader.  People who who tried to make changes or modifications in Tozan pieces were sometimes cast out of the guild and so organizations split off from Tozan and were not permitted to keep the Tozan name, an example being the Ueda ryu. With Kinko, on the other hand, if you rewrite all the honkyoku but keep the original spirit of the pieces then theoretically you can create your own branch of the Kinko family, so there are various groups like Chikuyusha, Chikumeisha, and Chikudosha, which all play the same honkyoku but with slight differences.  My own group, the Chikudosha, split away from another branch of Kinko, called Domon Kai (the Notomi Judo line; Notomo Judo was considered National Living Treasure by the Japanese government) as recently as several decades ago.

In Kochi, Japan, if you are watching a hogaku concert you can often tell the difference between Kinko and Tozan players, though not always.  Most Kinko players wear a hakama/haori when performing Japanese traditional music; they sit in seiza (kneeling) and put the music notation flat on the stage floor in front of them; Tozan players usually sit in chairs and use music stands, and they often wear Western clothing -- suit and bow tie, suit and tie etc., instead of hakama/haori, but again, there are exceptions.  Tozan players generally play newer, Western influenced music; sometimes in Tozan group pieces with many players there is even a conductor up on stage with his/her baton, something you usually don't see with a group of Kinko players.  Kinko players play gaikyoku pieces more frequently while Tozan players are more likely to play shinkyoku but again, there are exceptions, with standards like 'Rokudan No Shirabe' or 'Haru No Umi' being played by both groups.  And then there are the differences in the music notation between the various groups...

The shakuhachi maker who has made the majority of my flutes, Genpu Morikawa, recently came to Kochi from Kyoto and gave a lecture/demonstration on making shakuhachi.  I asked him what the difference between Tozan and Kinko flutes were and he said that for the modern flutes there is no difference except in the shape of the utaguchi so I guess it may depend on the individual maker as to what the differences are.  As for other differences, Yokoyama Katsuya, in his transmission of Watazumi's dokyoku, emphasizes the importance of memorizing the komuso pieces in order to truly know them.  To my knowledge that is not stressed in the other Kinko schools or by the Tozan ryu, where the players usually have the music notation out in front of them but there may be exceptions, such as Chikuho ryu.  There's an interesting article entitled 'The Shakuhachi as Spiritual Tool: A Japanese Buddhist Instrument in the West ' by Jay Keister, in Asian Music: Spring/Summer 2004 which I would recommend for anyone interested in differences between the schools and changes currently going on with the shakuhachi being taken up in countries outside Japan.  Please excuse this somewhat rambling commentary... I hope it can help answer some of the questions regarding the differences between Kinko and Tozan.

Indeed! Thanks for the eloquent and detailed response.

Zak -- jinashi size queen

Yungflutes wrote:

When I think of Kinko, I think of virtuosity  and elegance. The Dokyoku seems like riding a wild horse in comparison.

Great simile there.

eB