Shakuhachi Intro 8 – Notation 1

hi i'm marcus and i play the shakuhachi in this introductory series on the shakuhachi we already covered a few topics the history of the shakuhachi how to get your first tone what a suitable first instrument is and so on and today i'm going to talk about shakuachi notation but before i start in the spirit of christmas which is very close even if maybe you see this video half year later in hot summer it is very close to christmas so please do me a favor and subscribe to my channel or like the video if you like it uh that would mean very much to me thank you very much the first thing that i should say about chakra notation is that shakuachi notation is a very big mess not quite as messy as my studio at the moment which i'm still remodeling but it is very messy at first i thought oh yeah i'll just do a video on shakuachi notation but then when i started getting into it making my notes for the video i realized that it is actually quite a big topic and it can be very confusing so i'll split this into multiple videos and in this one i'll just talk about the basic symbols and about the very fundamentals of notation and then in future videos i'll talk about other topics like uh the rhythm for example or more ways to write mary and curry and things like that as in all my previous videos i should mention as well that i'm talking about kinko notation and in particular about the notation that is used by the ksk by the kokusai shakuhachi kenshukan this is the school established by yokoyama katsuya and before we get into the actual details of notation i need to point out that shakuachi notation as all japanese traditional japanese notation has a very different purpose than what we may understand a score to be or notation to be in the west in japan the notion of a score is that it is just a memory aid so it has no intrinsic value and apart from the simplest songs you cannot really play a shakuhachi piece just looking at the notation and just playing from the notation in contrast in the west especially in classical western music the score has very high value and there is this notion that really when you perform a piece of classical music or a piece of music that you interpret the score so the score is the origin and then the music follows from the score and you can see that this view is diametrically opposed to the japanese view scores may be written in beautiful calligraphy but apart from that they have no value they have no musical value as such and this view on notation is also one of the main reasons why there are very many variations between scores even from the same school even from the same writer because as i say it is really only a memory aid there is no standardized notation as such that you're expected to interpret when you perform a piece of music so the japanese way to learn a piece is to listen to recordings to get to know the piece to get some instructions some explanation on the piece and typically you would get this from obviously a person who knows the piece and typically you would get this from a shakuachi teacher because in particular for shakuhachi i'm not so sure about other traditional japanese instruments but in particular for shakuhachi there are very many nuances that you have to produce to adequately produce and perform a shakuhachi piece and these really can only be learned by direct instruction from a teacher so starting at the beginning um this is a typical score that you could find this piece is and the thing the first thing that you need to know is that obviously this is a japanese score so we use the traditional japanese writing and this means we start at the top right and we go down and then we take the next column and then we go down and then we go to the next column and go down and we go from right to left not from left to right okay so this takes a bit of getting used to and as i say you go from top to bottom um the very first thing that you will have here is the name of the piece so this says and some explanation may follow and here this is where in this particular notation this particular score the piece actually starts the symbols that are used in shakhaji notation are taken from the japanese katakana alphabet and each of the symbols represents a fingering on the instrument so it does not encode the pitch as we have in western notation where a c for example or a c1 let's say encodes a certain frequency but in the japanese notation this encodes a fingering so for example if i have the symbol re this means on the shakuhachi i have this fingering where i have holes one and two open and i'm closing holes three four and five okay this is what the symbol represents this means that we can have the same note in the western sense so a musical event with the same frequency if you like um by having different fingerings so for example if i take the note e this that is this note holds one into are closed three four and five are open this is the same note this is the same frequency as i have in kanoro so this node and this mode they have the same pitch but they are different notes in the japanese system one is where all holes are closed one where you have the top three holes open and for the shakuachi this is particularly relevant because it is very important when you play a piece on the shakuhachi to think about the tone color that you produce so if you play an e you have a more open sound and when you play a role you have more overtones okay there are already videos on how to produce the basic notes in otsu on the lower register and a con and a higher register so please refer to these videos and i'm going to link them up here so yeah please look at those videos if you want to know more about the basic notes in the two main registers there are three registers on the shakuhachi two are the main registers the first one is otsu the lower register and then we have khan which is the higher register and above khan there is daikan in most traditional pieces you really only use otsu and khan and maybe one or two notes from daikan so from the third octave but modern flutes actually can produce most of the notes in daikan as well so in modern pieces meaning pieces that have been composed in the 20th century or later you have notes in daikan as well the symbol for otsu or it is traditionally also called ryo but in ksk we call it otsu the symbols are here for utsu and for lyo i just need to edit it correctly and for khan we use this symbol here and then we have daikan which basically just means big khan the basic rule is that at the start of a notation the register is indicated and you stay in the same register until another register is indicated so if you start a piece in otsu for example you just continue playing in otsu until kan is being notated and then you stay in khan until otsu again is indicated however there is one big exception and that is the change from re to raw or from re to tsu so if you play nori so d and not zoom that is this node where 3 and 4 are open all other holes are closed and the next notated node is row then this node this row is played in khan so not [Music] okay that's exception number one and exception number two is if two follows after re you also play it in the high octave and come so and not okay so in that case for example if you play re and want otsu no tsu so su in the lower octave this would have to be explicitly notated okay but if it's not notated always means in otsu and then 2 in okay the other way up so if we go up we want to go down as well is easier because d is actually a note that only occurs in otsu so in the lower octave that means that if you play tsu and kan and then the next note is re this always has to be otsu because re only exists in otsu the corresponding node so the node where you close one and two and five and have three and four open in khan is called he so we use a different symbol so this is re otsu note and he and khan this means that whatever note wherever we are if we're in khan if we're in daikan if we're in otsu it doesn't matter when you see re it's always this note in otsu if you see he and you're somewhere in otsu or you're in daikon he is always played in khan so this makes the downward movement easier so the general rule that you just stick with the same octave until something else is indicated holds except for the change from read to row or from re to two okay and there are actually a few other notes which are specific to an octave so for example which is this note here it's a half step below g also is only notated for otsu and here just to look back to what i said earlier we can see that the fingering is encoded and not the pitch because this note when we play this in khan we use a different fingering okay so here we use this fingering for khan we use this fingering for otsu it is even a bit more complicated than that because you can use this fingering and also as well however mostly you use this fingering for this note this ooh fingering for the note there are a few more of these cases where you can immediately see whether a note is in khan or an otsu just by looking at the symbol itself and you don't need to worry about the octave being indicated on the right by the corresponding symbol the next symbol i'm going to briefly talk about is this one here again i need to edit this properly afterwards this is called an atari this is a finger hit ataris are really just so let me so if i play ref for example and i want to repeat right this is what this is what we do traditionally for japanese music that we lift the finger for western wind instruments the technique that is used is tonguing so we do so to repeat a note we would do this this is not done in traditional japanese music instead you just keep blowing so the airstream just keeps constant and then you lift the finger okay this lifting of the finger is indicated by the atari or this repeat mark just to add a bit more to the confusion there is also a way to repeat a note by hitting the next lower note down and that is usually regarded as equivalent more or less depending on the musical context et cetera et cetera but there we really get into the nuances of shakirachi technique which we're not doing in this introductory video um okay but the basic symbol is the repeat mark the atari for the artery for the finger hit the next basic aspect of shakarachi notation is how to notate maddie and cuddy i've not yet made a video about mary and curry because actually it's quite a complex topic but there will be of course a video on maddie and curry as well the basic symbols for maddie and kari are these again edited in later and they are just the katakana symbols me for short for maddie and ka for curry is quite straightforward so playing curry just means go half a step up so for example if you play chi and then it says chi curry this just means change the angle change your blowing angle and go half a step up that's basically what curry means the story for mary is a bit more complicated because we can not only go half a step down but we can actually go down one and a half steps and with proper technique we can go down even further than just one and a half steps from a note but for notation purposes we really need to worry about going down one and a half steps there are three levels of meri half a step down one step down and one and a half steps down what makes mary a bit complicated is that sometimes maddie just indicating maddie with the symbol means that we go down half a step and sometimes it means to go down a whole step for example for ray means go down half a step however if mary is indicated for re so for this note again it means go down a whole step the reason for that is that the distance pitch-wise between the basic notes is not always the same between row and su there are one and a half steps between tsu and re there is one step between re and chi there is one step between qi and re there are one and a half steps again and between d and row there is one step again for those cases where we have one whole step many indicates a half step down for those cases where there is one and a half steps between two notes many indicates go down one whole step this means that for these two notes for su and for re if you want to indicate to go down just half a step we use chumy and the symbol for that is the kanji chew again edit it in here i hope and this means go down half a step means go down half a step means go down half a step from two the third thing that can be notated is called daimari or omeri translated big maddie and this means go down half a step more from maddie this means for re to start with that if we have indicated maddy we'd go down half a step if we have indicated we go down a whole step okay mary indicates half a step already a further half step for d and for two mary already indicates a whole step down and it means that su daimeri means go down one and a half steps this is exactly the same pitch as ro so from that is maddie and i'm eddie this is two diameter this is the same pitch as ro [Music] okay and the same system holds for re the reasoning behind this is that diameter when we talk of dimeri it means that we have the same pitch as the next lower basic note okay so if we have a diameter we go down to two if we have two diameter we go down to row pitch if we have hurry dimedy we go down to g pitch if we have g dimedy we go down to red pitch that takes a bit getting used to um to make the distinction that this symbol this katakaname can mean something different depending on the note but you'll get used to this quickly i'm sure the final symbol that i'll briefly talk about is called kamuri or nayashi and this is a movement of going down and going up again so basically kamuri and nayashi mean the same thing and there is just one symbol this wavy line and the terms really don't have a distinction some people prefer to make somewhat of a distinction where kamuri is this movement so i'll do do it from brad this means go down by playing maddie to the two pitch and then come up again okay this would be called the kamuri whereas nayashi also starts at a lower pitch but then goes up slowly so so usually you would call it nayashi when you play re and then start a new movement by going down to the diameter pitch equivalent to two and then going up slowly and kamui would just be a fluid movement [Music] okay but notation wise this is the same and again we link back to something i said earlier to really know what is written in the score you have to either listen to somebody playing the piece correctly or you have to talk to a teacher or to somebody who knows the piece and can explain it to you because just from the score you cannot tell the difference all right um that's it for the first part of notation of shakiraj notation i hope it was not too confusing i try to be as clear as i can if there is anything unclear leave me a comment down below i'm always happy to give you more information and if what i said today was too confusing which i know it can be then there will just be another video trying to make it a bit clearer um so yes please leave me a comment uh again as i said at the start of the video please subscribe to my channel um it really makes a big difference in particular because my channel is still very small steadily growing but still very small so every subscriber really counts thank you for that and please like the video the youtube algorithm really likes that and if you want to see more of these videos that really helps not just motivating me but also motivating the youtube algorithm that you actually see the videos when i publish them okay thanks for watching this video and i hope to see you in my next one bye

Channel: Markus Guhe

Views: 2,025

Keywords: shakuhachi lesson, shakuhachi flute, shakuhachi instrument, flute, 尺八, japan, shakuhachi, how to play shakuhachi, how to play, how to, japanese flute, lesson, japanese traditional, japanese traditional music, japanese music, meditation flute, shakuhachi tutorial, shakuhachi flute how to play, shakuhachi beginner lesson, how to play shakuhachi flute, japanese traditional instruments, bamboo flute, japanese bamboo flute, notation, KSK, kinko, shakuhachi notation, 国際尺八研修館

Id: hAghk71_Ws8

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022