Japanese flute music is very comfy for me because the rhythm is free and intuitive and nature-sound-like, but at some point I want to be able to do things like playing modern music at a nice pace or just accompanying wadaiko in festivals. and my problem with that is that I hate metronomes. Really fucking hate metronomes. Can't stand the damn things. (I wonder how European Common Practice musicians trained rhythm before the invention of metronomes.)

It's not the clacking that bothers me, it's the deadness of fitting into a grid. This schoolroom feeling of it, this dictatorshipness (but I repeat myself). Even though rhythm is fitting into a grid? But it feels so different when it's someone playing the drums. I considered using the library's Volca Bass, or borrowing their Stylophone Drums, to have something more interesting than a clack, but in the end a drum backing track on youtube is much better for me, though still I feel like I'm missing something. I'm not sure I can explain it well.

If you want to understand harmony you go to European common theory, if you want to understand modality you go to Middle-Eastern or Indian music. I don't think there's any continent in the world that has developed rhythm to the degree that African traditions have. Almost every music genre I can think of that does interesting things with rhythm traces down immediately to sub-Saharan African music. Samba, maracatu, macumba drums, umbigada, the large majority of Latin rhythms, all from Africa. Metal and punk and hardcore all from rock, from blues, from Africa. Taiko ensembles, from jazz drums, from Africa. Hip-hop. Sometimes the rhythm comes from Arabic and North African cultures instead (flamenco, much of Brazilian Northeast). The long tabla cycles of Indian/Carnatic are something I want to understand better, and definitely also the interlocking patterns of gamelan of course, with that satisfying buildup to the big gong. But what attracts me to African rhythms isn't just the famous polyrhytms, but especially the basic element of it: the timelines. The timelines are almost like a metronome, but there's something else. I don't know what's the something else but it allures me.

At the outset people focus a lot on the patterns of the timeline bells, but that's not what intrigues me, I mean the patterns are cool but nothing that you couldn't do with a drum machine. I'm interested between the difference in playing to a drum machine vs. to an agogô.

There is some hints: the timelines, the gamelan interlocks and the long tabla patterns all feel cyclical—music not as a development towards a conclusion, but as a loop, generously endless for you to join in. They're all communal forms of playing; like harmony, rhythm as a thing that helps you do music together, to transcend individuality without losing it. There's this feeling that musicians are not “hitting” or “missing” the beat as if you were playing dance dance fucking revolution, but rather that they are playing with—alongside, against, weaving in-between, laying out contrasting patterns atop—the structure provided by the reference instrument. In a simple word, there's a feeling that they're dancing.

In the African timelines this is the clearest because, for example, the Bantu bell player (who's the reference point, the “drum beat”) will be watching and interacting with the feet of the dancers (I'm told). I'm thinking of the ubiquity of tapping the foot to understand rhythm, even in the most stoic European Common Practice musician figuring out sheet music, sitting alone by the piano dreading their grades in the next lesson. But to recognise this as what it is, a dance, and then make the rhythm reference not dictate the dance, but play with the dancers! There's an echo of that in the rave DJ, I think, the way they will do drops and chillouts and crescendos while watching the crowd, almost as if the crowd were their instrument. I have to imagine a good DJ will pick their tempos based on on what the crowd is telling them back.

So here's my first few vague notions of rhythm:

• Rhythm is an embodied thing. Even if nothing in the body is visibly moving, my tentative definition of “being in rhythm” is: to be dancing, internally if not externally. What bass players call “being in the groove” is some state that happens in your body.
• There's a deadness to the metronome that bothers me; a kind of mercilessness.
• The living, pulsating rhythm that interests me is human;
• Communal;
• And interactive.
• From that I come back to the Japanese free rhythm. it's not really “free” in the sense that you just do anything. It's dancing with something, too, only it's something less obvious than another musician or a steady loop. To a first approximation: with your breath, but it's not just your breath. I want to say “with your internal fluctuations” or “everything around you” or “the cosmos”, but if I try to separate any of those things I feel like it doesn't make sense, it's all the same stuff. It's hard to put in words; but it's also not learned by putting it into words, so that's ok.

One element I spot often in Amazonian music is a leg rattle, tied to ankles or shins or knees, used in stomp-dancing to keep rhythm. While in full effect when a group uses it, it also pops up in vocal or instrumental solos. I don't know what rhythm is, but this is certainly rhythm:

If my understanding of rhythm is correct this should be something that would help me—level up the foot tapping by making it into an instrument. A bit of a challenge to play the flute while moving and not lose the notes, but exactly the challenge I need right now anyway (getting a stable, reliable air column that can withstand stuff like this). I'm already able to play Cosmo Canyon, but it sounds so lonely without drums (consider this shinobue cover). This sounds like a good way to improve my sense of rhythm: improvise an ankle maracá of some kind, then stomp throughout this song I know.

When I tried once to explain briefly to a friend what it was all about, I found that with the exercise of severe economy I took 41 pages and 10,000 words. (J.R.R. Tolkien) #relatabel #justlikeme #frfr

I think most people haven't browsed the History of Middle-Earth and thus don't know how much Tolkien struggled with executive dysfunction and how much of his work is unfinished. HoME is 12 volumes of unfinished, unedited, often contradictory material; it's not a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, a narrative of events in the realms of Arda, it's a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, I, Christopher Tolkien, will show the boxes and boxes of Middle-Earth manuscripts that my father started and never completed; it's a history of the work we call Middle-Earth, a history of revisions. And that's still not all of it! Most of the stuff that interests me was to be slowly published even later, in the periodicals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon, and occasionally in books like The Nature of Middle-Earth (2021). It's still not all published, by the way. Christopher and the Tolkien Estate editors involved with this describe it more to the note of “scratched the surface” or “tip of the iceberg”. Yes, this is the most famous name in fantasy and most of his material remains unpublished.

That's in part because most of the material is not fiction stories per se, there's no unpublished novels or missing adventures of Sam Gamgee, it rather has to do with his life work: the languages and their legendarium, of which the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was something of a diversion, an offshoot pressured by editors after the success of The Hobbit—and the bitter initial rejections of the Silmarillion. Most of Tolkien fandom is primarily interested in the LotR story, which to his credit he did write to the end, quite neatly (the sequel was abortive and there's many unfinished prequels and side stories, but there is a big main story that he, unquestionably, shipped). Therefore Tolkien doesn't come across at first sight as particularly having trouble in getting things done. Yet we don't have even a basic Quenya grammar. He couldn't even settle definitively on basic details of morphology.

And this is not a small detail that's missing; it's his entire goal. He did his best to explain as explicitly as he could that the story exists to flesh out the languages and not the other way around:

If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. [emphasis his] The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a 'hobby', pardonable because it has been (surprisingly to me as much as to anyone) successful. But it is not a 'hobby', in the sense of something quite different from one's work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stones' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. I should have preferred to write in 'Elvish'.* But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much 'language' has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked more.) But there is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually 'elvish' names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic', as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what is it all about?' [emphasis mine]

*(Oh for an LotR entirely in Quenya! Look at what they took from us ;–; )

…But most people just aren't interested in conlangs, or philology or phonetics or grammar or anything of the sort, which is like, perfectly ok, I'm also not interested in car motors or materials engineering or a ton of other things; it's just that this attitude obscures from view the thing that Tolkien put the most work about, as if I read a novel written by a mechanic who dedicated literal decades to producing plausible fictional vehicles and I just gloss over all the “car parts”; only it goes a good deal deeper because language is the material from which stories are made of, so it's more like a musician who designs his own scales and tunings and custom instruments at great pains, only for most of the audience to focus entirely on his love lyrics. Even now, for example, I'm looking at a summary table of the 12 HoME volumes on Wikipedia, and the current revision unexplainably omits the Etymologies and List of Names that take up most of vol. 5 and all the linguistic material on vol. 11, both of which remain the largest published non-journal source of Tolkien's original goal. (For more on Tolkien's attitude to conlanging and his theories about sound and meaning in artlangs and natlangs alike, see A Secret Vice , 1931, published 2016.)

Tolkien's narration is intended primarily as an experiment in his phonaesthetic theory, but the way this operates on most of his readers remains purely subconscious. Middle-Earth feels strangely palpable, like you could just peek around the book page and see some more of it, in a way that most of its imitators failed to reproduce; because without considering the languages you can't explain why it has that effect; and few people ever set out to experience the artistry of Quenya morphology. (For more on this topic see The Road to Middle-Earth, 1982).

Meanwhile the Silmarillion, a book so central the Life Work, was something that he struggled with his entire life and could never finish, precisely because he cared about it much more than about the LotR story:

My chief joy comes from learning that the Silmarillion is not rejected with scorn. …But I shall certainly now hope one day to be able, or to be able to afford, to publish the Silmarillion! a sequel or successor to The Hobbit is called for. I promise to give this thought and attention. But I am sure you will sympathize when I say that the construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind, and the Silmarils are in my heart… (1937)

As for larger work. Of course, my only real desire is to publish ‘The Silmarillion’: which your reader, you may possibly remember, allowed to have a certain beauty, but of a ‘Celtic’ kind irritating to Anglo-Saxons. Still there is the great ‘Hobbit’ sequel – I use ‘great’, I fear, only in quantitative sense. It is much too ‘great’ for the present situation, in that sense. But it cannot be docked or abbreviated. I cannot do better than I have done in this, unless (as is possible enough) I am no judge. But it is not finished. I made an effort last year to finish it and failed. Three weeks with nothing else to do – and a little rest and sleep first – would probably be sufficient. But I don’t see any hope of getting them; and it simply is not the kind of stuff for odd moments. (1945)

My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion. My estimate is that it contains, even without certain necessary adjuncts, about 600,000 words. One typist put it higher. I can see only too clearly how impracticable this is. But I am tired. It is off my chest, and I do not feel that I can do anything more about it, beyond a little revision of inaccuracies. Worse still: I feel that it is tied to the Silmarillion.… (1950)

As for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, they are where they were. The one finished (and the end revised), and the other still unfinished (or unrevised), and both gathering dust. I have been both off and on too unwell, and too burdened to do much about them, and too downhearted. Watching paper-shortages and costs mounting against me. But I have rather modified my views. Better something than nothing! Although to me all are one, and the 'L of the Rings' would be better far (and eased) as part of the whole, I would gladly consider the publication of any pan of this stuff. Years are becoming precious. (1952)

The surprising welcome given to The Lord of the Rings will probably make this procedure unnecessary; and has justified the publishers’ firm resolve to issue the present work first; though I wanted to present the matter in ‘chronological order’. For one thing, it would have lightened and quickened the narrative of the Third Age! […] Since the publishers are now pressing for the Silmarillion &c. (which was long ago turned down), I do intend as soon as I can find time to try to set the material in order for publication. Though I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day… (1955)

I am not writing the Silmarillion, which was long ago written; but trying to find a way and order in which to make the legends and annals publishable. And I have a dreadful lot of other work to do as well. (1956)

Yes — the Silmarillion is growing in the mind (I do not mean getting larger, but coming back to leaf & I hope flower) again. But I am still not through with Gawain etc. A troublous year, of endless distraction and much weariness, ending with the blow of C.S.L.'s death. (1963)

I regret very much to hear that you have contracted to write a book about me. It does meet with my strong disapproval […] I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the Silmarillion. I am constantly interrupted in this […] (1966)

I wish I had time to produce an elementary (both languages are, of course, extremely difficult) grammar and vocabulary of 'elven': sc. Quenya and Sindarin. I am having to do some work on them, in the process of adjusting 'the Silmarillion and all that' to The L.R. Which I am labouring at, under endless difficulties: not least the natural sloth of 77+. (1969)

Thank you for your most kind letter and for your general interest in my work. I am however now an old man struggling to finish some of his work. Every extra task however small diminishes my chance of ever publishing The Silmarillion. So I hope you will understand why I feel it impossible to spend time making any comments on myself or my works. (1972)

His last letter to Lord Halsbury is particularly poignant to me:

When you retire I shall certainly beg your help. Without it, I begin to feel that I shall never produce any pan of The Silmarillion. When you were here on July 26, I became again vividly aware of your invigorating effect on me: like a warm fire brought into an old man's room, where he sits cold and unable to muster courage to go out on a journey that his heart desires to make. For over and above all the afflictions and obstacles I have endured since The Lord of the Rings came out, I have lost confidence. May I hope that perhaps, even amid your own trials and the heavy work which must precede your retirement, you could come again before so very long and warm me up again ? I particularly desire to hear you read verse again, and especially your own: which you make come alive for me… (1973)

He died later that year, without, of course, ever finishing the Silmarillion. The version heroically put together by Christopher, the 12 volumes of HoME, the periodicals, the Nature, all of it, are attempts to make sense of the mountains of manuscripts and notes and lexica and grammars and minutely crossed-over-and-recrossed miscellanea produced over those decades, the details of the language changing every time he touched them:

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book [Lord of the Rings] is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what the [LotR] was all about, and whether it was an ‘allegory’. And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo, and that the phase long antedated the book. I never heard any more.

(=“A star shines on the hour of our meeting.”) But even in this paradigmatic example, he later changed it to ~ omentielvo, because he added exclusive vs. inclusive distinction in the first person plural, as in Tupi, and omentielmo is the exclusive 1p.poss, wholly inadequate for the greeting. Or that's how a nonbeliever would put it, but as someone touched by the star-light I feel icky writing the previous sentence, as if committing a sin. Tolkien would say rather that he found out that Quenya had an inclusive/exclusive 1p. distinction, and therefore there was a mistake in the Red Book which he translated to English (=LotR), probably because Frodo's commandment of Quenya was shaky, but this was glossed over so latter versions took the liberty of fixing the hobbit's grammar. This process of discovery, of “revelation” rather than “invention”, is one of the factors behind the incredible depth of the legendarium and the source of much of my favourite work from it (like the Shibboleth of Fëanor, an entire side story of bitter political drama that came about when Tokien set to find out why Galadriel used the incongruously innovative form súrinen rather than þúrinen when she sings Namarië.) Alas, the same process of revelation also results in a labyrinth of revisions and amendments and contradictions that became humanly impossible to round up in a single lifetime.

That's what studying Tolkien languages is like; one might naïvely look for the “final” or “definitive” version of the grammars, the vocabulary, the corpora, but there's no such things; Tolkien who self-defined so strongly as a philologist produced, ironically and entirely by accident, an entire philological area of his own, devoted to digging up manuscripts and comparing and classifying them and documenting their differences in minuscule detail etc., much like we do with philological manuscripts in our world, except in this case they're all from a single pair of hands (allegedly). Authors who produce “Elvish grammars” or “Quenya courses” that try to fit it all into a single, self-consistent system and gloss over this richness of variation do a disservice to the Tolkienian heritage, and necessarily have to deviate from the author and shape the languages to their own vision; to beat up and prune and shape philology until it becomes no more than linguistics.

And that, this entire text so far, is my way of prefacing the point that GRRM and Tolkien aren't so different actually. I don't bury the lede, I compost it. You'll understand why it's so easy for me to sympathise with these particular old men, in contrast to how I usually feel about straight male writers. (I'm still short of 41 pages in this particular exercise of severe economy, I hope.)

This is why when I watch George R.R. Martin say last month, for the tenth time or so, that he will stop with all his side projects and distractions and focus on finishing the Life Work, after having produced half a series of novellas and one volume of a history book by accident, the entire ordeal reads very familiar to me; the way that he words it, his self-loathing, his repeatedly shattered optimism, the pain of ageing etc. The main differences are on matters of primary focus: for Tolkien it was the languages and the legends, it was his belief that languages literally shape the legends written in them, so it felt impossible for him to reach a “good enough” consonance between grammar and myth, sound and meaning. For GRRM the main interest is ethics and politics, and the Life Work is to present many different points of view at the same time, all of which are flawed but also humanised, all of which making both good and bad points, and then wrap it all together into a single picture of humanitarian ethics; he has quipped often about Tolkien never explaining what was Good King Aragorn's tax policy, but it's been 30 years and we still know nothing of Good Queen Alysanne's tax policies either, turns out consistency in political history is as hard to portray as consistency in phono-semantics. I imagine if GRRM wrote on paper and preserved his output we would have endless boxes of manuscripts to thrawl through in posterity, just like Tolkien. Instead of philological journals and etymologies, maybe they'd be published as case studies in political theses; a sort of baroque multiverse of alternate timelines and different takes on the characters, each growing into archetypes. But that probably will never come to pass, because another difference between the two authors is that GRRM edits destructively in his MS-DOS computer, and he does not want manuscripts to be investigated posthumously. He's not a philologist.

As for me, when I watch these suffering old men struggling so much to deliver works that, yes, I dearly wished I could read, even now, right now—I just want to tell them that maybe it's ok to not do things. It's ok to not finish things. You have already done a lot and enriched the lives of people like me. I don't want to have even the most wondrous works of human creation if that comes at the cost of human happiness, of entire decades of anxiety and misery. It's fine to go out walk in the sunlight, have some tea. Do nothing, and do nothing guilty-free for once. There are more books to read, more languages to learn, more politics to discuss than we could fit into a million human lifetimes. I will yearn for these unfinished works like one yearns for the Lonely Isle, for some distant, remote shore; and I'll cherish the sweet pain of the yearn, a pain that like rain after the drought brings about fanfics, and close-reading theory podcasts, and philology journals, and the inspiration to create our own, entirely original works.

It is thus that life goes on—imperfect, incomplete, tumbling, reproducing, continuing; life is movement, it is messy chaotic growth, not the static and dead perfection of geometrical monuments; life is the untamed growth that escapes all systems, it's a profusion; this is true both of the life of flesh, and of the life of spirit. Tolkien has once remarked that Esperanto and the other auxlangs of his time are “deader than dead”, because their grammars were created without an accompanying mythology, without a culture and a history; I agree entirely; but Quenya and Sindarin and even brief sketches like Adûnaic and the Black Speech are alive, they left behind the magnetically charged tracks that only living things leave; not just because Tolkien provided them so richly with poetry and myth, but because they were allowed to grow so profusely as to remain unfinished, to keep changing until they were cut short too suddenly by death, like all of us.

1. Start memorising from session #1

Not: “I'll learn to play it first, then I'll work on memorisation”. Prime the mind to expect that this is what we're doing here; this is meant to be memorised. Of course you can't memorise a whole piece in one go, but work on at least one bar or at least a few more notes. Be in “memorisation mode” from the start.

2. Avoid automatism.

Just like skill-learning, memorisation ignores repetitive drills. People repeat music pieces in school through drilling them hundreds of times, then promptly forget them, just like everything else from school. You need a certain feeling of struggle, of endeavouring to commit; it's better to spend 5-10 minutes of active effort trying to internalise a passage, than 1 hour doing the same thing again and again at half attention.

One way to work on both #1 and #2 is: Always try to play from memory first, only then reach for the score. If you think you're misremembering something, try to recall it by finger and ear first, and only then reach for the score. Fight a bit. Keep yourself challenged.

3. Chunking.

You already know this from other memorisation tasks: It's easier to remember the piece if you name and group notes together. This can be from music theory (“after this comes the arpeggio”, “now it's the chord change”) but it can also be from song lyrics (“now's the ya-yo-i climb again”), or whatever name you make up for a passage that makes sense to you (“now it does that high trill again”, “only this time it's the spicy drop”).

Scan for patterns both identical and little variations (“now's the intro prologue but lower”).

4. Leave the comfort of the score

As soon as you can more or less play it from memory, stop reaching for the music sheet. Shelve away the score and keep it there, you only play this from memory now. Again, challenge yourself. If your goal is to play without looking at the score, looking at the score will stop you from that goal.

5. The show must go on

If you make a mistake, keep playing. Imagine you are audience and the musician made a mistake: you don't want them to stop playing and wince and sigh and self-denigrate etc., you want them to make it still work, right? There's no way to develop that muscle if every time you forget a phrase you stop everything to indulge in negative self-talk and start over trying to be perfect. Do the thing you want to get better at doing: performing music, not ragequitting. Put a plushie on a chair and play for the plushie and when mistakes happen (“when”, not “if”), try to make the most out of it and still come up with an enjoyable performance for the plushie.

Even the best professional musicians have made mistakes on stage, you're not going to be the first perfect musician in the world. Rather you have to learn to turn stumbles into part of the dance.

Realising this actually reconfigures the early stages of memorisation entirely. It's natural to find it grueling, since you keep making mistakes. But improvising a way to carry on from mistakes is a crucial skill; you have to be flexible; you have to absolutely master the art of creating beauty out of happy little accidents. And you can't practice that art with a piece you already know by heart, you have to actually stumble to learn not to wince at stumbles. So it's precisely in these initial stages of learning a piece that you can experiment with ways to patch over an error (fill in notes from the same scale? jump to the next bar? do improvisation techniques? fall back to a chord drone and let the other instruments take the stage for a bar?). Therefore the initial learning period is valuable; treasure it.

6. Go slow

This is the same as for learning the piece in general, or for any other skill where speed and timing is important (like martial arts). We have a natural tendency to want to go fast as soon as possible, and going slow feels effortful. But experiment with both approaches, and you'll probably find out that going fast doesn't really build the skill very efficiently, while if you do it in slow motion, all of a sudden you can go fast afterwards, in a much smaller total time than it would take if you kept insisting on training full-speed-with-mistakes from the start. (This seems to be an exception to the rule of “practice the actual thing you want to do”.)

This tricks me because often I see musicians saying “when I approach a piece I have to go as slow as 80bpm…” and meanwhile I'm already making mistakes left and right at 80bpm. I've had to slow down simple 4/4 tunes as much as 40bpm before I could do them without mistakes. At this slow motion speed it's barely registering as “music”. Yet this allows me to think, actively, about each note as they come, to really understand what's happening, without automatism. Once I can play a passage at 40bpm from memory without mistakes I find I can also play it at 80~100bpm without having to drill these speeds at all, and 140+ with only a bit of training.

Shinobue books will often have titles like “The joy of shinobue” or “Gentle shinobue for everybody”. Then there's the reverse psychology way of appealing to customers: Toki Tatara's Oni-ren (“demon training”) drills carry the implication that if you survive these intense exercises from hell, your skill level will go up. But does either rationale necessarily follow?

Language is a special thing because it's an instinct, like walking. A baby exposed to language will acquire it without thinking. Contrary to popular belief, adults also acquire language not through analysis or drills, but intuitively through use; essentially, your provide material to trigger and feed the instinct, then you get out of the way, and let your subsconscious do the work. Formal exercises like grammar drills, duolingo etc. are a red herring and a waste of time.

The worst part of the pointless exercises is the “fullmetal alchemist law of equivalence fallacy”: the idea that if you pay a high price, that must mean you're getting a quality thing out of it. No, sometimes you're just getting scammed. Boring grammar drills feel like you must be making progress, because they’re boring. You did the pain, so you should get the gain, right? Wrong, language acquisition happens pretty painlessly actually. It feels like something that goes in the background when you're focused on something else. You're trying to understand the uncaptioned new season of your favourite series to see what happens, not trying to “learn English”. When you realise it, English has happened to you.

This is very unlike learning (say) to embroider, or to solve calculus problems. A baby exposed to embroidery or calculus will never get anywhere. Not even writing works like language. Most skills have to be studied, learned, not simply acquired.

But music is complex. A baby exposed to music won't pick up an instrument and produce music-passing noises without instruction (I think ??). But they will definitely dance and sing, and intuitively be able to tell what type of music is meant to be sad or upbeat or relaxing. Music seems to sit halfway between instinct and artifice.

Some approaches to music are a bit like language acquisition, or like embroidery. I'm thinking of the type of folk music environment where people learn mostly by being given an instrument and a handful of simple instructions, and then get basically thrown in the middle of a jam, sink-or-swim, with no theories or formal drills of any kind. This type of music learning focuses on the ear, on intuition and musical sensibility; which feels quite sensible to me since music is a sound and feeling thing, not a sight and think thing. Then at some point your music group is trying out a different raga and that's when you learn how to play in the other raga, or even what is a raga.

Then there's the traditionalist academic conservaitoire type education, of course. Music theory, sight reading, scales, chords, drills, études. A teacher from this tradition will tell you sternly, don't just go and try to play popular songs on a random instrument, you'll suck. Get a firm grasp of the fundamentals, then you can play any song you want from sheet music. Delay your enjoyment for (a year/ five / ten years), do the work first. This is a bit like the art teacher who says: don't try to draw animes and cartoons, you have to be able to draw realistically from still life before you can play with abstracting features into cartoons. If you go straight to cartoons you'll suck. Now here's five workbook recommendations to work on your anatomy and perspective…

Approach the one, and approach the two. If you want to learn how to make music, which one? If you mix them, then how much of which, when, in what context?

It's easy to dunk on the academic approach but when you've been drawing animes for a while and every single time your faces end up deformed in a way you hate, you start kinda yearning for some repetitive anatomy workbook that promises you it will finally make your faces look like faces. Maybe if I do these scales every day for six months I'll finally be able to jam in a way that will feel like music, rather than random noises that don't fit with the track?? It's easy to think that music should be purely aural and intuitive, and I'm sure this is true at some essential level, but for very complex music like Bach I feel like I can appreciate it much better after learning theoretical concepts—and while watching a graphical visualisation of the counterpoints.

And then there's some even more mysterious effect where binging too much on music theory for a few weeks has increased my intuitive sensitivity to music. It's not that I now go, “oh indeed here the composer has subverted the progression from a subdominant chord to a counter supradominant augmented inverted borrow of the Locrian mode, a bold move 🧐”. No, I still can't tell what key a pop song is in, let alone whatever the heck is happening with the chords and modes and all that. But without me being able to analyse it in any way, Terra's theme from Final Fantasy VI now has made me cry. Multiple times. I first played Final Fantasy VI decades ago, Terra's Theme is great but it never made me cry before. I have no idea how or why this happens. Maybe it's just being in increased contact with music at all that expands one's sensibility, not the theory itself. But it doesn't feel that way; it feels like learning abstract concepts with the rational mind has primed the intuitive mind about what to pay attention to, like my subconscious was listening to the 8-Bit Theory videos along with me. That may be purely imagination on my part, of course.

Then again, the notion of “hell-training” has serious issues with selection bias and assuming causation. “My teacher yelled at me constantly while I did two hours of solfège chords on piano for two years straight, and I became a good pianist. So that's how people become good pianists”. This ignores all the other students who quit along the way, and fails to consider if there's any other ways that people demonstrably become equally good pianists, without the yelling, maybe without even the scale drills. Maybe if you do 2 hours of anything on the piano every day you become a good pianist? Or maybe not literally anything, but maybe less boring things would also do?

Which I guess is the basic idea of music pedagogy approach the 3: modern iconoclastic methods. Methods that believe the academic approach kills the music, starves it from all creativity and originality and joy, and makes traumatic bugbears of what should (in a moral sense) be a form of play and fun bonding. The iconoclasts often will chase spontaneity and joy first, encouraging dancing and whole-body involvement, and offbeat stuff that can border on corporate team building exercises. But hey, who knows. Maybe juggling balls before holding onto my flute will help me relax and make my kan register less strained?? I feel about musical education the same way I feel about my sex life: dunno fam no idea how any of this works, I'm open to try anything as long as that mysterious chemistry hits.

Unlike the case with language acquisition I don't think the repetitive drills are best thrown away in the compost piles of history. My daughter is an artist I admire, and her sketchbooks are filled with, say, one entire notebook only of hands in various positions, another just with sketches of shoes, or houses, etc. But as a mother I also know better than anyone that my daughter has been drawing for fun and joy since she was, like, 5; she doesn't draw as a duty, she draws as a distraction, as procrastination, which is the same sweet spot where language acquisition happens. I would escape math class by secretly reading books under my table; my daughter would draw. I became an academic, and she an artist. When I tried to learn to draw, I perceived it as a highly frustrating activity; nothing looked like the way I wanted, and the process to improve it felt like an impossible mountain to climb. For my daughter, drawing can get frustrating at times, but overall it's what she does to relax when something else is frustrating her. Climbing the mountain is a pleasant hiking stroll to air her head.

This is very much comparable to how language acquisition happens best through binge-worthy material: hours of activity is the king, whatever you can find that keeps you engaged for a huge fuckton of hours is what will get you there. Of course, the real problem is how to find input material that is 1) compelling to you in particular while being 2) sufficiently intelligible that you can engage with it at your level. Transpose it to music (pun intended): I don't think one can become an artist or musician without nurturing that sense of enjoyment of the process itself. Any music method that keeps you engaging with your instrument in any way gets a huge advantage against the competition, in my book. But of course if you keep doing the same thing forever you won't advance. Question is what kind of musical activities can be compelling for you in particular, while still developing skills upwards? What activities are engaging and beneficial? Sometimes it feels like boring works best—it's less boring to play a piece at speed and wholesale, but when I'm unable to do that despite repeated attempts, then working on it bar by bar in slow motion seems to get me there. But if that's all that I did all the time, I'd burn out fast.

I worry about the musical intuition, the sensibility. Some people believe sight reading and playing by ear are mutually exclusive, learning to read scores would ruin your aural sense of musicality. I think it must be more like my daughter, who seems to build her artistic sensibility both with the “folk” method (intuitively by imitation and exposure—she used to spend days binging on art tutorials on youtube, drawing along coaches) while also using the “academic” method (by reading on colour theory or doing perspective work, for example). I don't see how learning one thing would ruin the other, though of course some people are more naturally inclined towards one thing or the other. But one can probably mix and match, try one way when the other isn't working; I think nothing stops you from learning chord progressions academically but solos intuitively, for example.

I guess some sort of balance is warranted, but I don't want to just say: “they all have their place”, that feels like too easy a solution, too facile. There's no cosmic balance reason why every method should necessarily be as valuable or effective as the others. Who knows? Maybe it is just like language acquisition and all those drills aren't doing anything, and you could just have been doing fun intuitive explorations all along and it would work even better at training musicians. The conservatoire people know a lot more about music than I ever will, maybe they're right and and you can only really get fluent in an instrument if you do solfège over scales every day for ten years.

Purely through my own bias, I tend to believe the folk method must be the best supported; clearly the academic approach works for training musicians in the European classical tradition of the 18-19c., but that's an incredibly narrow definition of music, while folk methods have been used for everything from indigenous sacred music to Bulgarian choirs to Afro-American rap to Brazilian repente to Indonesian gamelan, and much else besides. The problem is my trichotomy comes apart at the seams when you look at it more closely. It's not like older traditions don't have drills or hell-training methods, for example, even if less intellectualised than orchestral conservatoire principles.

Maybe the key is to go to the repetitive exercises very deliberately, with a specific goal in mind. You have to treat boredom as costly, and be thoughtful about how to spend your daily bore budget. Doing drills because they're hell-drills is a mistake, and extrinsic motivation (like grades or diplomas or a sense of clout) is downright counterproductive. But they become intrinsically motivated when you're trying to achieve a piece, and there's a weakness you understand and want to address. Like, my daughter filled endless pages with shoes because she was already drawing scenes that she wanted, except she kept being frustrated with how the characters' shoes looked like. I'm very glad to have found Toki Tatara's drills on dynamics right now because it's super clear to me how much her rendition of Sakura benefits from that type of dynamic phrasing, and I envy that, I want to steal her technique; I want to be able to do dynamics like her in my own Sakura. And it's very transparent for me that if I can apply that crescendo-decrescendo shape to repetitive long tones, that will make me able to do the same to the crunchy minor seconds of Sakura. This feels very different than unthinkingly doing scales every morning in the hopes that it will make me a good musician somehow.

Crucial to this is that you have to do the exercises with the deliberate intent of actually getting good at the thing you're exercising. If you're not improving, the exercise isn't working and should be reconsidered. This sounds silly to even say out loud, but the psychology of training is kinda fucked up, it's actually deceptively easy to fall into a “duolingo” mindset, a Protestant work ethic mindset, where the suffering is the point, basically in a moral sense. You define yourself as somebody who is “bad at anatomy” or “bad at timbre” and you're not really taking in consideration what life could be if a few weeks from now you become competent at anatomy or timbre. Your definition of “myself” would change, you won't be able to hide behind “ugh I'm so bad at this”... anymore, and that's scary. But that scary place is where you want to go. It's important to not take the eye from the ball, to not let suffering become, perversely, a kind of end in itself, a part of your personality, a brag (“yeah I've been doing 2 hours of scales every morning for a year, it's hell… [smugly]“).

Thinking about it as martial arts training: the point of shadowboxing and bagwork is to punch the other girl in the face. You have to want to punch the other girl in the face. If you're just standing there and punching randomly at sparring you're doing the other girl a disservice, too, you're teaching her bad habits, neither of you is learning boxing. You have to be actually trying to win the match. If you can't evoke that crave, all the shadowboxing in the world will be just a cardio routine. If you're not yearning to play a piece with good tone, all the tone exercises in the world won't make good tone happen.

The danger of the academic method is pedestalising suffering for its own sake. By the same token, the danger of the joy-based modern approaches is iconoclasm for its own sake. Not every icon is as clasm-worthy as the others. Iconoclasm is great when it improves something, otherwise you're just being a contrarian for the sake of your self-image as a contrarian. Sometimes traditional methods are kept around just for the sake of tradition even when they're bad; but sometimes traditional stuff gets abandoned just because it's old, when it's actually well-motivated. And the danger of the folk intuitive approach is plateaus and sameness, I suppose. In Japanese folk for example there's a tendency where “living treasures” (more or less “geniuses”) emerge every so often, get treated basically as gods (sometimes literally), and everybody else just tries to imitate the geniuses. Maybe one can use one of the 3 practice approaches to escape the limitations of the others when they become a drag, like, eyes on the ball: do whatever feels more appealing to you as long as it keeps being engaging, but if you start feeling like you're not improving, try one of the other approaches; just make sure you're actually trying to get somewhere. “Drill and hope” probably doesn't do much.

I was surprised to find, already at this level, a discussion of how the cross-fingering known as 0—nominally the same as a flattened 7—is actually not exactly the same pitch as 7♭, and that the difference should be used mindfully for emotional expression. Moreover the nuances are specifically noted as relevant for what I've been obsessing with for over a year, which is to play a good rendition of Sakura, Sakura in particular.

Wild mountain cherries (left) and the elegant Somei-Yoshino cultivar (right). Image from Siezarrei's blog.

In the shakuhachi world, meri (noted as ﾒ or ×) is the gesture of tilting the head to shade the blowing hole and flatten the note. But a note can also be flattened in the usual flute way, by half-fingering the note’s tone hole, and this can also be called, broadly, meri; the word is used much like “flat”. In the shinobue world, head-meri isn't common because the notes get too breathy or disappear, and meri usually refers to half-fingerings. Due to mechanics and anatomy, the way you shade each hole is different; usually much more of the hole is covered than what the name “half-fingering” may suggest.

In the base registers, higher notes are created just by lifting one more finger, effectively shortening the length of the tube; so that fingering 1, 2, 3… is when you open one, two, three… holes, which on a size 8 (8-hon chōshi) will do a C, D, E… Therefore for fingering 6 (A) you close only one hole, and for 7 (B) no holes at all. And for 7× (7-meri) you half-close the topmost hole.

Now fingering 0 is a strange cross-fingering. You close all holes but 6, the next-to-last one (●○●●●●●). This produces something nominally in the same pitch as 7×, but there's nuances. Even the basic booklet remarks that 0 tends to be sharper than 7×, though still flatter than 7. We could maybe distinguish those as A♯ and B♭ and clarify there's a microtonal difference between them. But it gets deeper:

7× and 3× are actually played lower than 7♭/3♭ to create a tense, beautifully delicate nuance of expression [不安定な美しい繊細な表現].

Meanwhile 0 is considered to not have the same anxiety/instability/tension (不安). This is interesting because you can control the pitch to an extent by covering the hole more or less with your finger—in fact I find it easier to play a 7× tuned to A♯/B♭ than to do the same with 0, so I was surprised to learn 0 is supposed to be the sharper one—but no, it's 7× and 3× that are used for extra-deep microtonal nuance, which means they're played lower than a flat on purpose.

(With 3 this is easy because I find it hard to play a regular E in tune in my shino anyway, my flute in 3 seems to be naturally a bit flatter than the nominal chromatic, and 3× follows suit for E♭).

Using microtonal notation rather imprecisely, we could say that the shinobue nuanced notes are (again, on size 8):

• 3× : E♭♭~E♭
• 0: A♯
• 7×: B♭♭~B♭

Where B♭ and A♯ may be more or less the same note, potentially with a difference in colour, but B♭ often hits lower, and B♭♭ lower still.

Then there are even more alternative fingerings for a note “between 6 and 7”. Treat this tentatively since it’s subjected to my amateur technique as well as varying with the instrument (I’m told). But on my Rakusui sudake 8-hon I’m getting, in the low register:

• ●○●●●●●: Bb -40c
• ○●●●●○○: Bb +25c
• ○●●●●●●: maybe B-10c (subtle enough that it gets confused with natural breath angle variations from tapping the fingers.)

The first example is the widespread “0” fingering. Second one is given as an alternative fingering (替え指) for 0 by Tomomi Yoshino, who gives the caveat that it doesn’t work well on every instrument. The third is noted as ⑦ (or really as circled-七) in this chart by Sugiura Neo. I got the results in cents in the low register (ryō), by finding an angle and air speed that plays a 6/7 in tune with equal-temperament A and B, then doing my best to change the fingerings without altering the position or angle or breath speed or anything. Since 0 is supposed to be sharper than 7×, I don't know if I'm doing something wrong that mine is so flat.

Unlike the finger-shadowing gradations and the choice of 0 vs. 7×, I don't think nuances of the other alternate fingerings are used in the traditional shinobue repertoire (in so far as that's a thing, given that folk shinobue weren't even tuned to a reference scale to begin with). But that may be just ignorance on my part.

And then back in the Yamada/Fukuhara booklet, they give an example of how to use these gradations with nothing else than Sakura, Sakura:

In Sakura, try to deliberately establish a different atmosphere by varying the pitch of the 7×. I believe with a higher tone you make it like a Somei-Yoshino, while a lowered position gives you wild mountain blossoms.

This is delightful.

The version of Sakura I've been doing starts on kan register at like A-A-B…, which on a C-keyed instrument requires no half-fingerings. But then you stay very high on the upper registers, so it requires super good tone control to hit those extra-high-pitched notes without sounding too loud and strident (in the shinobue the high notes have to be loud and strident, but there's a degree of dynamic control with practice). This is the reason why I've been struggling so much with trying to get a pleasant tone and timbre out of the highest notes.

But to do that microtonal modulation effect, we need the notes to fall to either B♭ (7×) or E♭ (3×). The version of Sakura in the book is transposed to start on D, like, D-D-E, D-E-F-E-D… which will fall down into the ryō register on either B♭ or B♭♭ or A♯ , according to how you want to perform it (the spicy note will hit on the “wa” of yayoi-no-so-ra-a-wa…).

I'm thinking I can perform by doing both—first the low-register version, then the high-pitched version—which amounts to a change of key, or more precisely of tetrachord nuclei. The higher Sakura I've been trying is on tetrachord E·A, but the version in the book is A·D, meaning the miyako-bushi colour note transposes from F to precisely that spicy A♯/B♭. And happily, the fact that these tetrachords share a nucleus gives me a jumping point to transition (the melody of the one version ends on the start of the other).

Anglosphere websites often mention “min'yō”, but the chant doesn't sound anything like min'yō at all, in style, musical structure, or mood (compare). I think this is a misinterpretation of the character 謡 (it's used for more things than min'yō, people; if he meant min'yō he'd say “min'yō”). Another common claim is that it's an ancient wedding song. But the lyrics were written by the anime composer (in Old Japanese), and wedding songs aren't really a thing. This is probably a misunderstanding of the song being written in ancient language and being conceived as a “marriage of human and machine”. The song itself isn't ancient.

From the composer I only found vague mentions of it being written “in a Japanese key” (which might be a mistranslation of 調, mode/scale).

I tried solfège'ing it to a tuner, and I made the discovery that I can't solfège worth a damn. Then I remembered Musescore exists. If we can trust user tuliusdetritus' transcription, we're getting CDEF#GAB, which I suppose could be ichikosuchō—a mode from gagaku, not really folk music but sophisticated court classical, based on Chinese classical. Here's an example of ichikosuchō:

The (absence of) rhythm, the percussion and the overall mood makes me think of noh music (hayashi)—compare—which is also suggested by the character used to describe it (謡 rather than 歌 is used in the noh world). And the chimes used in the percussion are probably an allusion to the sacred bells used in Kagura dancing.

So my best guess for Ghost in the Shell’s Making of a Cyborg is:

• An imaginary wedding song
• With lyrics in 8th-century Old Japanese, in the mode of Nara-period folk poetry
• Recited in the traditional way to read poetry, as in e.g. hyakunin-garuta
• And set to sophisticated, eerie minimalistic theatrical music
• In a scale/mode from classical Sino-Japanese court music
• Accompanied by shintō purification bells
• And sang in three voices with dissonant harmonies in the manner of Bulgarian folk music.

Footnotes:

1) Buddhist chants (shōmyō) do have harmony, but I consider this to be an imported style in Japan, like Chinese or modern Western music.

If we try to classify wind instruments by how you operate them, how you produce sound, rather than the abstract principle of it, we could for example have:

• Edge-blown/rim-blown flutes, or “flutes proper”: Blowing bottles. You shape the air stream to skim the edge of a container, which resonates the air inside it. Pitch and timbre can be altered by blowing technique, and octaves can be jumped by overblowing. Can be transversal (Western concert flute, piccolo, baroque; Irish flute; shinobue/ryūteki/nohkan; dízi; bansuri; pífano, etc.); end-blown (shakuhachi; quena; xiāo; kaval; washint, etc.); vessel (xūn; xutuli), probably more types too. Panpipes are a variation where notes are created by multiple flutes of different sizes. Overtone flutes are a variation that relies entirely on overblowing.
• Oblique/bilabial/interdental flutes: Similar in mechanism and abilities as edge-blown flutes, but the air is guided by direct contact of the flute with the two lips, often in a diagonal hold. There's two variants of these instruments, either for pressing against the lips externally (kawala; Turkish ney) or to hold by the teeth, with the tongue touching the flute (Persian ney). Examples include all variants of ney and kawala/kaval; tsuur/choor/sybyzgy; the qurai. The reconstructed, prehistoric Pueblo/Anasazi/Mojave flute is in this category.
• Brasses (lip flutes): Blowing raspberries instruments. Sound is generated by buzzing the lips, and the pipes simply shape and magnify the buzz. Didgeridoo; trumpets; alphorn; the jug; karnay, etc.
• Assisted wind instruments: Sound is not produced directly by the musician's air blowing, but instead the air is guided by set mechanisms within the instrument.
  • Whistles (assisted flutes): Sound is produced by a ramp that forces the air to hit the edge at a set angle. Whistles; recorders; ocarinas; sazsyrnai; Native American (=Turtle Island) flutes, etc.
  • Reeds: Sound is produced by two plates that vibrate when you blow them, like the lips in brass instruments. Harmonica; saxophone; mijwiz; pi nai; gaita transmontana; shēng; melodica, etc. There's probably many subdivisions here that I do not have knowledge about; the way one blows a harmonica or melodica seems significantly different from the embouchure of a saxophone or clarinet, and these again from the mijwiz.
  • Electronic wind instruments (EWIs): A breath sensor detects air pressure, speed etc. and converts it to an electric signal, used to synthesise sounds.

And we exclude instruments that have the same underlying mechanisms but the air does not comes form the performer blowing, like the accordion, the pipe organ or the melodion.

The advantage of thinking of wind instruments by how they're blown is that 1) it's not that obvious, and 2) knowing about that allows for technique transfer as well as planning musical potential. If you play the shakuhachi you know you can adapt to a quena, and if you're composing for any edge-blown flute you know that you have on the table glissandi with some variation of dynamics along with the pitch, or breathy sforzando, or accented attacks that briefly go a microtone up; whereas if you play the sax you'd have much more technique transfer to the clarinet than the flutes. If you play trombone and you want to experiment with something meditative, and you picked a bansuri, you'd have to learn it from scratch; but with a didgeridoo you could get started right away.

In my phase where I'm learning music, I catch myself every so often remembering Tônica Dominante (2001). I think I'll rewatch it. It wasn't a big success, even for arthouse-movie standards. Many critics panned it. It currently sits at 3.1 stars on adorocinema.com . It's a movie about music, about the impossible inflexibility of the perfection it demands, and I guess many people found it gimmicky, the structure too obvious and cheap: three days, each day a musical movement, like a sonata; each movement colour-keyed graphically, to varying success of photography. It's not particularly engaging or especially philosophical. But something about it stayed with me all these years, whereas I fully forgot the plot or even the title of most Cannes Festival winners I watched in that cinema-rich period of my life.

At this point I only remember flashes of the movie, of course. The relentlessness of the music teacher, a strict elderly lady representing the impossible high bar of art. The protagonist musician crushing on the virtuoso player but too unskilled to even play in the same league as the big kids, forced to work as a page-turner to even be close to the high-level relationship between the virtuoso and the strict teacher—another transparent metaphor about the musical experience. This one absolutely heartbreaking scene where the big day comes and on stage the protagonist panics and fails to turn the pages at the right time and spirals and it gets worse and worse, and the pianist plays wrong before the audience and it's all his fault, under the unflinching gaze of the teacher and the crush, of the art and the beauty he longs for and—that's not actually the heartbreaking part, that's not where the movie gets cruel; the cruelty is when the piece is over and audience applauds. Everyone oppressively smiling, overjoyed. a standing ovation. He messed up before the gaze of art, the music was wrong and it's his fault, and nobody was able to even understand what happened. The loneliness that is, to crash against that wall.

Now in the age of excess of information, I can read stuff about the movie, to learn the lore that I never knew. I did infer that the director must have been a musician—that much is self-evident—but not that this was Lina Chamie's first movie. I did not know that the movie struggled with a shoestring budget, that she had to creatively find ways to work with cheaper ways to do cuts and whatnot. I didn't know that the lead actor had an accident mid-recording that left him in a coma and subsequently with partial memory loss, interrupting the production, nor that his recovery was in part helped by the director herself, giving him therapeutic clarinet classes.

Wait, clarinet? Yeah. I did not know Lina Chamie, who made an entire movie about how impossibly demanding music can be, a movie that got stuck on my brain for years—Lina Chamie is a flautist.

I was thinking how one would characterise traditional Japanese music in broad terms like this, like, in a nutshell, what is emphasised in Japan more than elsewhere? I would characterise premodern J music by its restraint.

I often feel like honkyoku, for example, is the music that bamboo would make if bamboo made music spontaneously, without intention or human involvement. One Japanese scholar, Saitō Takao, has drawn a scale with “nature sounds” in one end and “European music” on the other, and posited Japanese music to be halfway between the two. If you think of the (kinda ethnocentric) definition of music as rhythm+melody+harmony, all of them get restrained in one context or another:

Rhythm: Honkyoku deliberately eschewing any simple repetition or beat, notes having a certain rhythmic identity but following the breath and emotion of the performer without fixed guidelines. Hayashi ensemble deliberately opting not to have a beat drum or conductor and instead using shouts. “Jo” sections of jo-ha-kyū structures meandering and free; ha accelerating without a set defined pace.

Melody: Folk instruments like the hayashi-shinobue not being tuned to anything. Each nohkan sounding different, with octaves not octaving. Tunes being defined by fingerings not by note, resulting in modulation whenever played in an instrument of different size. Melodic structures that use “bad” intervals, unclear progressions, or what appears to be isolated random notes in a sea of silence, yells etc. Or, conversely, a minimal 5-note melody that repeats, in, a, loop, forever (in matsuri music). Noise as a feature (flute breathiness, shamisen sawari/buzz etc.), allowing among other things higher tolerance for imprecise tuning.

Harmony: The above details of tuning and fingering blocking harmonisation (there's only two melodic instruments in a hayashi ensemble, voice and nohkan, and it's impossible for them to harmonise; also for nagauta flute vs. voice, etc.). Dissonance as a feature. Absence of chords in string instruments traditions (in any of the various styles played with koto, shamisen, or biwa). Small number of performers on most traditional ensembles; focus on solo (shakuhachi, hōgaku), monophonic melody+percussion (hayashi), or like 3 performers (sankyoku). Inclination to counterpoint and unison.

None of those things are like, universal or absolute: gagaku cared a lot about being in tune and harmony, tsugaru-jamisen is characterised by well-defined, dizzyingly fast rhythms, etc. However, compared with other music traditions, I think Japanese music is more prone to go like, “ok now let's not do this obvious/pleasant thing: aw yiss, that hits me right in the mono-no-aware”. A bit like the musical equivalent of writing poems about withered branches in winter rather than cherry blossoms in spring.

Accordingly, this is the musical tradition I know of that makes the most use of silence. I think it's a basic factor of art in general that “the silences are notes too” and musicians everywhere will be acutely aware of the importance of the notes you don't play. But I don't know any other type of music where silence is so frequent, long, and present; so energised, sitting there with you in the room with the meaning-laden stillness of cowboys in a Wild West movie staring at one another at dawn before drawing the gun. If the European tradition loves to have tons of different instruments playing together at the same time, the Japanese tradition loves to get all the musicians in the room to stop playing altogether.

These tendencies are about old music, not the modern musical landscape; still they come out in the oddest little places, like the quick spread of the melancholic miyako-bushi scale with its dissonant 1-semitone interval (which I take to be something like the blues, in context of origin and mood, except it would be like the blues scale took over children's songs and nursing rhymes); or the way that, for example, Ghibli's Laputa soundtrack was rebuilt from scratch for the USA release because the original movie was considered to have too many minutes without any music at all, which for a North American audience was considered uncomfortable.

CEFAB [thinking even more] E-F-A is a tetrachord, and I guess I could consider B and C to be affixes (the notes are like, right next to each other). But what if you take B to be the “upper” tetrachord, then the perfect fourth would be… E, ooh you build the rest of the miyakobushi scale back to the beginning, because the tetrachord ends up B-C-E, which is, again, a miyakobushi tetrachord. Intervals are 1, 4, then 2 to change tetrachord, then again 1, 4. 1-4-2-1-4 is the miyakobushi scale.

So we could transpose Sakura to a Ryūkyū scale with… lower tetrachord E-Ab-A, upper B-Eb-E? So instead of: AAB AAB ABCBA-BAF, you'd have AAB AAB ABEbBA-BAAb? (tries it out) well that sounds off. What if we align the scales some other way, so that the intervals kinda match better:

E F A B C E 1 4 2 1 4

E Ab A B Eb E 4 1 2 4 1

[thinks harderest] well rotate it a bit and:

E>Ab F>A A>B B>Eb C>E

BBEb BBEb BEbEEbB-EbBA

Omg this kinda works hahaha I've invented the Okinawan Sakura. I invented the Deigo Deigo