Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Hi Airin,


I have a lesson each month, for me that works quite nicely. The teacher is a 75 minutes travel away, and indeed a week seems a bit short to dive into the 'homework'. As you wrote he gives me a load of stuff to work on; pieces, excercises, longtones etc.
I think respecting you feeling about being rushed and tension is important, in this matter I believe you are your best master to tell wich interval suits you best, also because you know your personal live the best knowing how much time you play etcetera.
Maybe you can talk about this to your teacher? Being overtensed and stressed doesn't support the learning (and fun).
oh to add: I am a beginner just like you, we started playing I think about the same time, now about 4 months for me. (and I had 3 lessons).

greetings and a happy new shakuhachi-year!

From my experience with lessons (not shakuhachi, but silver flute, voice, and social dance), the time to reduce the frequency of lessons is when your lessons turn into a guided practice instead of any information being transferred, particularly when you know how to practice well enough that a guided practice session isn't even teaching you how to practice. It takes a while to get to that point, so in the beginning weekly is fine. If you have no musical experience that phase will be a longer time than if you have already learned an instrument to a decent level of accomplishment. That phase where weekly lessons are best will be even shorter if the instrument you already learned was a similar instrument. For example if you already learned silver flute, you won't really need very many sax lessons.

Keep in mind there's a big difference between learning to control the instrument and learning the music commonly played on that instrument. Almost anyone who grew up in America will be able to make a formidable attempt at playing a Christmas song or two even on an instrument they just picked up and can barely play. However, if want to learn Japanese traditional music and you weren't exposed much to Japanese traditional music, your going to have to take lessons fairly frequently for a long time even if your instrument of choice is a kazoo.                   

airin wrote:

However, by the time I return to my lesson I find that I am not anywhere near the level of accomplishment with regards to that week's homework as I might be if I had practiced for a week or two longer.  I then feel I should be practicing more and this creates a feeling of tension and time pressure.

What you're basically saying here is that you aren't able to integrate the previous lesson before going on to the next lesson. You really need to talk to your teacher about this concern. If you can't resolve this with your teacher satisfactorily, maybe this isn't the best teacher for you. I say "maybe" because if I remember right you haven't been playing very long at all and at the beginning the learning curve for any instrument is steep and can be frustrating. You might just want to have faith that your teacher knows what they are doing for a while longer. Then, if you still feel like something is wrong, it's probably time to try a different teacher. It doesn't necessarily mean your teacher is a bad teacher, people learn differently and some teachers are more suited for some individuals more than others.

I'd suggest that aside from the focused practice to make some time for some mindless "noodling" (maybe it would best be called meditational blowing ). Can't get into kan? Spend some quality time in otsu. Aside from the focused practice, you need the social dance equivalent of "floor time", just get out there and have some fun. That's where a lot of the integration of the lessons happens. This is what is behind the pedagogical idea of focusing on what the student does well and growing that instead of focusing on the problem areas and trying to fix them.

I concur with the "more is better" thoughts already expressed. Until a student's life is such that they can't *not* practice on a given day, anything less than weekly lessons is asking for trouble. My experience has been that, with lessons 2 weeks apart, one's psyche adopts a "the lesson is next week" modality, and all of a sudden, and way too soon, it's the day before lesson and not nearly enough practice has happened. Part of instruction is making a life change in the student so that daily practice is a reflexive part of their life, and it gets harder and hard to do that the further apart lessons are. This is a human activity, so we're almost necessarily operating under a bell curve, so there will always be a few who can take sporadic lessons and progress well, and/or have the daily work ethic already, but I believe we're addressing the greatest number of students here.
later...

I concur with Dun Romin, lessons are a pretty personal things, and learning is too. It all depends on your goals as well. Playing for fun and yourself needs less specialised lesson I think then playing the traditional way and honkyoku.

Tairaku, you wrote that problems can arise when not having lessons once a week, what kind of problems or bad habits do you run into with students?
As a beginner I can indeed be more blind to that part and 'think and feel' once a month is ok, but that might be untrue...

Bas

I started with lessons (online) a year after studying on my own. I initially took lessons about once a month and had plenty of stuff to work on (which I did for 1~2 hours daily) until the next lesson. Now I schedule lessons more sporadically but often put two or three in a 2-week period as I go over specific pieces/phrases/fingerings, etc. I'm now faced with the daunting task of getting my Tsu meri, Tsu dai meri, Ro meri, and Ro dai meri in proper pitch on the fly -- seems to me that this is simply something I need to work on by myself (well, with a decent tuner). I'm making daily progress and am convinced that this will allow me to take my playing to the next level.

Hope this helps.

Zak