Japanese Music Notation (shakuhachi music)

all right so you know how Western musical notation is read from left to right it's kind of how we organize musical time along the horizontal axis similar to how we read the Latin alphabet from left to right but it doesn't have to be that way because after all other cultures have alphabets which are read from right to left so recently I've been thinking about musical notation systems and how they might be different between different cultures and my friend Zack zinger plays the traditional Japanese bamboo flute called the shakuhachi he's a trained jazz improviser but recently he's been taking the shakuhachi and adapting it into a jazz idiom by this point he's probably had one of the world's best jazz shakuhachi players and recently I got a chance to record with them definitely check out this video if you have a chance the link is in the description but in addition to his jazz playing zach is also a dedicated student of more traditional styles of shakuhachi playing so I could think of no better person to talk to if I wanted to compare east-asian of musical notation and Western musical notation and find the musical reasons why they might be different shakuhachi music is tablature it's just like Guitar Tabs where they're showing fingerings on the guitar except each one of these symbols denotes a fingering on the shakuhachi shakuhachi has five holes four in the front and one on the back okay so we're reading down here and then then once you get down here you jump up a line and go to the left okay so essentially if we turn it like this you're reading the same way as you would oh that's convenient but but it's not it's just a different thing for the eyes to look at these symbols are just katakana which is one of the three written languages in Japanese and you actually call the notes by the same names you see here the lowest one everything closed is a D and that's row that's what we call that that's the character sue and that would be F so I'm just lifting up a finger the next one is Rea just lifting up fingers the next one is cheap and then re and that just repeats itself so there's five notes that you're working with them and everything else is just manipulations of those five notes exactly but with this simple piece what we're seeing is there are no sharps or flats or anything we're only seeing the pentatonic scale as is on the shakuhachi [Applause] so this is a song that's some it's out of a the folk music of Japan which is called mean yo the shakuhachi in this music is accompaniment Seattle I've had it described as comping on shakuhachi which is a really weird way to think about shock-watches role but the fact is shakuhachi is traditionally played exclusively by monks of a particular sect called the fook a sect for hundreds of years they were the only ones allowed to play it and had special permission from the government they were also forbidden to play with other musicians so you had this whole tradition of koto and shamisen and vocal music that shakuhachi was not even a part of it wasn't until much later that shakuhachi eventually became part of that tradition and started playing that I was in the Meiji era like in the 1860s so shakuhachi role was never to be the melodic lead it was always a guest in other music when you're playing in an ensemble this is sort of like a beginner's chart kind of like those old real books where they like put embellishments in for you but they're really not very helpful so this is a really simplified kind of thing for painters I notice the two four on the top exactly they're kind of combining it a little bit with western notation when we see lines next to it think of those kind of like eighth notes and sixteenth notes like the beams on eighth notes and sixteenth notes so what we have for instance here would be eighth note quarter note eighth note that makes up a 2/4 bar okay cool so have big 2/4 what would this be that would be a you know two sixteenths into eighth note eighth note dah dah dah dah oh cool so if I'm saying the tempo is one [Music] so I noticed that you did like a little grease no sort of thing did I tried to play that as straight as I could okay but some of these things like you practice them so much so in me know we have these effects the melisma x' that we're trying to recreate what the singer would do and we call them chloro Kashi Koro Kashi to be pronounced American you really just kind of improvise those you put those in where you want it's more like when you see one of those s-shaped things that nobody knows what it is over to happen oh they turn yeah are you morning's worth yeah it's not a Morton but yeah everybody calls it a turn yeah but I know there's a there's gotta be a more Italian word so to play this with with the coral gosh II [Music] it's not so much that we have beats but if we feel it from a Western perspective we're feeling on one and three so the gravity of this is it's not feels so wrong right yeah so and the way they dance to it also if you watch traditional Japanese dance it's very elegant but there's this gravity to it it's like you feel a point we're here we're here we're here we're here to get into something a little bit more complex when it's called zangetsu and you would put it on the stand kind of like this so each gu2 will start off slow so this is a very slow section and then it'll get into the tagatose section later on and that's much faster the shakuhachi player is playing pretty much exactly what the koto and shamisen are there are certain places where they split off but they're pretty much playing in unison the whole time and that's very much the sound of it harmony is irrelevant in this music for the most part so this is also kinko view notation so kinko view is one of the schools of shakuhachi and the one that I've studied the most and they have their own notation style you'll see that it's the same characters yeah and the lines go are now going through it instead of to the side this is standard now we don't have like the easy bar lines to follow along like you don't see these lines telling you where the beats are because there are no measures okay it's simply strong beefy so you're always conscious of strong weak strong weak right and the way we do that is you'll seem next to the characters they're these little dots so you see strong weak-strong weak-strong weak-strong week of this is also like I was saying gestural so you'll see like this isn't so much about subdividing perfect thirty-second notes as it is about a gesture almost like as you're going over a waterfall um okay it comes into that strong beat so if you were to just play it straight the way it is on the page you'd be missing so much of the subtlety that you that you learn from listening to it and for me from learning under a teacher I'm still an extreme novice in that but trying to pick up as much as I can so like there's a place down here um I took a breath here and when you start from a place of breath the no ray instead of starting you've started that's sort of a phrasing thing that you do in this particular style and if you listen to a kinko do you player play anything you'll hear that particular phrase it's like one of the lakes same thing if you start D you don't just start it like that you start it with booty could potentially write them all in but it would just look ridiculous and an experienced player knows to put those in anyway it would be like marking a vibrato in every place you're supposed to do in a classical piece or writing every note out for your drummer like it's gonna be better if you just let him do his thing [Music] there's this concept called MA which is the feeling of empty space and what you'll find in these really slow sections they also they kind of borrow that word and they say it's sort of the feeling that the whole ensemble has where we all know where the beat is even though we're not subdividing it's just this kind of momentum thing and this this gravity that pulls you towards this one that the strong beats okay so beyond these five notes that you have how do you notate anything in between them because you're obviously playing more than just five notes right since the pentatonic scale is not an evenly divided scale we're gonna have certain ones where there's a whole step in between notes and certain one where there's a minor third between notes between say G and F Ray and Sue so we call that they MIDI it's almost like G flat and the way we do that is not just by covering half a whole you can get the pitch there but the plateau might be right we also adjust with our mouth and head angle similarly if we have between a and G Sochi and array will just be a flat so that would be Chi no Mehdi where it gets more complicated is between F which is su and roll so the way they do it is a whole step down they call Medi so f2 e flat would be - no Matty the question now is what do we call E right because everything's been right so this is su choo MIDI okay so think of it like I don't know that Maddie in this case is double flat okay it's like F double flat and - Matty is f flat so MIDI is just this little X next to the note that means Medi okay and that's that's actually the katakana character May so this is a shortening of that [Music] this is King Cove you home kioku and this is what the fook a sect monks would have played and it looks kind of similar to the Giotto right yeah but I'm assuming that it's actually completely different not completely different the notation like the notes are all the same but their nose are they're stronger weak beats are not strong over there like you'll play these with a line through them faster about twice as fast as you would have played these but there are more phrase markings it's not about keeping a tempo this music is one of the most difficult to understand from the Western perspective because there is no rhythm there's no repeating theme it's solely about tongue these are compositions they're just things that they wouldn't meditate with there's no end goal to this it is a meditation tool for Buddhists really when you're playing this the idea is to try to focus your tone as much as possible [Applause] [Music] you also you can listen for the mode the Miyako Buchi scale so in western notation we would be thinking this one flat 2 4 5 flat 6 1 that's right yeah yeah on shakuhachi we only have 5 modes of it we don't play it in all chromatic keys because tone color is just as in point as important as pitch and you can't get the same tone color in the other modes right so because the whenever you shade a note slightly differently it it has a different color yeah so those no merit e notes definitely sound like quieter yeah yeah the the pitches are the same level of importance as tomber is this one would be a D flat D F a so if I play that F is very much not a merry note on shakuhachi and so we're losing that sort of weakness that softness of the fifth note so to do that we instead play Rea node I'm Eddy so think of it like G double flat so this would instead sound like [Applause] so you're using an alternative fingering and an alternative means of playing because flat 2 and flat 6 need to have that tone color which that's not a concept that's in western notation I've never seen it anywhere else it also notes about about that's the MIDI notes is that when we're going down they're gonna be flatter than Western notation would have us think so it's about it's more about that idea of gravity leading down so inside of it it'll be the goal is to be really almost quarter tone flat not precisely but to be really close to that D so that it'll lead us even more we cache it down that's another thing about shakuhachi is instead of breath vibrato like we used on flute we just pitched vibrato so last thing in this packet here is something I transcribed for the shakuhachi festal this is giant step suit just the first course a Coltrane solo which it's more just to kind of there were gonna be some people who didn't read Western notation so I want to have them something that they could actually read but in doing it it was just like more reinforcing that this is not what this music is for it's like it's so clearly that this is spurred a different notational system for a different music because you know you're not notating chord changes you're not none of this was ever really even written down until the late 1800s Early 1900s everything was just passed down by year and even then once it was written down it was more after you learned it by ear then this is just a reminder of what you'd already learned I mean kind of like jazz really like nobody ever really read jazz and then we started writing it down and it became this this thing that you learned through notation rather than by ear when I asked my Chocolat you mentor Bruce Hubner about uh so what is the what's like the concept behind these compositions and like what's the theme and you just kind of looked at me strange like theme there there's no theme it's the shakuhachi music is like a river just it flows randomly it'll speed up at certain points it'll slow down at certain points the one concept there's a phrase a well-known phrase in the shakuhachi world that it takes a lifetime to learn the shakuhachi so the earlier you start the longer it takes which I think could it be applied to any skill but it's totally not about mastery it's about going as far as you can so that's that's one of the lessons that I learned from this from studying this music all the instruments even have like they're supposed to represent something in nature and so shakuhachi is the wind through a bamboo grove because it's literally literally that's a that's a pretty literal yeah I didn't say it was creative

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 584,418

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: CpJPnCaIy80

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019