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

I'm thinking about conflicting advice today. In the era of youtube learning you get a lot of that, all the “dialects” of pedagogy get exposed. Some shinobue teachers for example teach that the change between register is all hara (diaphragm), you cannot rely on head or jaw or lip movements at all. Others will explicitly teach you how to direct the angle of the air by pushing and pulling the bottom lip, or bobbing your head up and down, or do not do any of that but just move your chin up and down. Many teachers tell you to smile (/i/ vowel position), while others say to pout a little (not as much as /u/ but like, halfway there). Some teachers teach you to incline the flute a little bit, with the tail closer to the ground than the head. Others will metaphorically whack you on the head if the flute isn't exactly parallel to the ground.

I don't know how much of that is anatomical differences. I seem to only be able to do a small enough hole with a bit of a pout, but my lips are quite different than a typical Japanese face, and much fleshier. On the other hand, wouldn't fleshier lips mean I should smile even more, rather than pout?

In any case much of this conflicting advice must be just a matter of style and habits—I bet you can make it work in many different ways. If I had a teacher, I'd just try to copy them and follow their advice—there's something that makes it easier to do subtle body movements when someone's in front of you doing them—but I cannot for the life of me find a shinobue teacher in Germany. I considered getting a shakuhachi teacher or even a concert flute/piccolo/anything teacher and hope that the technique carries, but also I'm broke.

So the only way I can walk the labyrinth of conflicting advice is to trust my ears, and try to note down whatever I'm doing in those precious moments when the timbre hits just right. Maybe even make a flute diary, like Miki Saito advises. The idea felt intimidating to me but I guess she has a point.

Some principles I think are universally agreed upon. Tension is bad, that seems clear; my notes get strained and bad-sounding and unstable when I can produce them at the cost of lots of facial muscle work. If you're doing position adjustments at all, they should be minute, almost imperceptible. If you have to nod all the way down and up to change registers, you're probably not controlling the air too much. Diaphragmatic breathing is certainly key, you need a strong pillar of air coming stably from the core whatever you do up there, I can't see how that would otherwise.

If I find positions and techniques that are able to produce all notes clearly and not whispery nor strained, in tune, consistently across the entire range including with big jumps, then I couldn't care less whether I'm smiling or pouting or what. Big “if” though.

Because like, samsho wasn't just my first contact with traditional Japanese music, it was my first contact with any sort of musical tradition outside the hegemony of Western/postindustrial globalised music theory brain, at all. But it's so much less impactful than I thought it would've been. Even inside the videogame fandom, there's nobody doing covers or anything, no transcriptions, nothing, it can't compare with contemporary games like Zelda or Final Fantasy soundtracks. There's approximately one billion takes on every single ocarina song from Zelda but nobody even tried to play the Nakoruru theme on the entire Youtube? Not even once? Hello?! I have hipster tendencies so I thought I'd pass on “Banquet of Nature” because it would be too cliché for flute players, and yet…

And I mean, it's not like we're spoiled for choice in iconic flute themes in videogame OSTs. Still what I thought was the most iconic Japanese fluteing turned out not to be iconic at all?

Morever it seems like SNK never released sheet music for them, or at least I couldn't find any from Doremi Gakufu or anything. I'm like but this is really good though?!? This music exists so presumably someone actually composed actual fucking honkyoku and kabuki music and whatnot, what happened to all their journals and notes about it and stuff? The brief remarks on the Samsho IV Arrange inset are all we get? The Arrange is actual live instruments, any comments from the shakuhachi players, the shamisen, the taiko?

[Edit : I've since found out that a handful of scores have been printed with various OST CD inserts: Banquet of Nature “Winter” and “Spring”, from samsho1 and 2 respectively; the excellent shakuhachi rock theme Homura, aka Honoo, from ss4 Kazama; and an intriguing shaku piece for Shizumaru Tsubana-Nagashi, from samsho2019.]

Then later I was thinking also of how frustrating it is that there's nothing like “8-bit theory” or “Charles Cornell”, like, those channels that analyse videogame music with theory and then explain how a piece works, but with ethnomusicology rather than Western tradition concepts. Because I'm dying to know like, what are even these musics? Is “Successively Foreign Girl” technically what, jiuta? tsugaru? It's frustrating, I think, that no one seems to look at Shuradō from Samurai Shodown IV to say, ah yes that's a tetrachord in E/A with the colour note in F, which makes it miyako-bushi, in the “ascending” variant because it has a 3-semitone interval (it uses D not C), and the progression follows a textbook jo-ha-kyū structure, much like “Successively Foreign Girl”, notice how the shakuhachi follows the drumbeats during and after the accelerando of the “ha” but it was much freeer with tempo on the “jo” and lets go again in the brief 'kyū”, it is instructive to compare the OST and Arrange versions because it shows how the timing of fermata in Japanese music can be intuitive and—

Only then I looked at the mirror and realised, huh it's a me. I'm her. I'm the one doing ethnomusicology analysis of the Samurai Shodown soundtrack.

Which is a bit of a scary thought because like, it's not like this is my field, weeb or not my knowledge of Japanese music tradition is cursory at beast, it cannot compare to a specialist who went to college for this. Nor of course my knowledge of general Western music stuff, I know less than the average person who can actually play an instrument. Like I said, I can't even tell which genres or tropes most of the samsho tracks are referencing. Then again this is an obscure videogame from the 90s and apparently nobody else seems interested in even trying, so…

It's certainly more beneficial to think: This piece is beyond my ability for now, that is a thing that can be fixed; and then think further: What am I missing to play this piece, and how do I practice that? And then set out to do deliberate practice, the way one would chase the requirements to unlock a skill tree in a videogame.

Today I was playing “Sakura” for the cherry blossoms in Köln, and it was like, recognisably Sakura, but certainly subpar. Not like, actually pleasant to listen to. But Hotaru and Usagi that I did as warmups, I feel pretty ok with how I play them those days. Ok, they're easier songs, but Usagi isn't that easier. Why do I feel comfortable with these songs, but not the other one?

I do pretty well at transitioning between the 3 registers that Sakura requires these days, and losing notes seldomly happpens. I've got the fingerings for the entire miyako-bushi scale down to pat, too. However, often my kan sounds too strained and nervous; sometimes I even get unintentional vibrato from tensed lips! While the ryo may start good, then after I travelled to kan and tensed up, when I go back to ryo later it sounds unintentionally breathy.

I think both things are caused by the air being too fast and/or general lip- and body tension. I finished practice with my shoulders aching. I'm pretty sure one's shoulder blades shouldn't be hurting from playing shinobue, I strict press 40kg, a shinobue is a bit lighter than that. And this tension must at least partially have to do with me making “playing Sakura” too much of a landmark, in my mind proof that I'm a “real shinobue player”, so I get nervous every time I try, like one would for the finals at school.

But there is no school and there's no finals. The exam is imaginary. I'm anxious for some arbitrary line I drew on the sand.

Ideas to fix those issues:

• Focused relaxation. I could try Jane Cavanagh's method where you play the same piece 8 times and each time you focus on relaxing one more body part (shoulders; then face/lips; then eyes; jaw; neck; chest/belly; throat).

• Body triggers for attitude. I'm having good results experimenting with doing the formal shinobue holding method, as if about to present at a performance, as a sign to get into “shinobue playing mode”. I could also do that with the rest of the body, like, assuming a sitting or standing formal position with good posture. Which would also help with:

• Diaphragm breathing. I know the basics but this can always be improved. I can do the “hoh!” exercise, or also play the miyakobushi scale a few times just concentrating on keeping the core engaged. Then while playing, concentrate on trying to draw power from the core (whatever that means).

• Tone quality exercises. Do scales again but focusing on finding the point with minimal effort and maximum ring to each note. The fact that I got fluent at the scale's fingering transitions means I can focus on the other parts. I've recently tried a thing from Inoue Mami where you look at the mirror and study the shape of your mouth hole, then try to keep it small, then try to bring the shinobue to your lips already at the right position by increasing proprioception of what the blowing hole feels like. So both git gud at playing a tone on first try thanks to correct positioning, and from that starting point, try playing the entire song using the minimum possible amount of air to not lose the note (or fall down a register).

And generally: play slow, one phrase at a time, again and again until that phrase stops being scary, then do the next one.

This way instead of excusing myself forever for “being bad”, we have a list of specific issues and a map of how to solve them (or at least potential ways to solve them). This principle applies generally.