The description reads: “An evil New Half spirit who wields power over ice. A minion of Galamoth.”

I don't have a series on early videogame trans women because there's not a lot of them, and they have been discussed elsewhere. The oldest I know of is Catherine/Birdetta/Birdo (1987~1988), the pink dinosaur from Super Mario, followed by drag queen Tessy LaFemme, the damsel-in-distress that you rescue as lesbian butch detective Tracy McDyke in the seminal Caper in the Castro (1988)—it's lovely how the very first cis lesbian and human transfem characters were in a relationship of deep companionship while fighting capitalists. Then we get sex-worker-coded and beloved sex icon Poison from Final Fight (1989), and Yasmin, the trans girlfriend of the cis guy protagonist in cyberpunk RPG Circuit's Edge (1990).

But I haven't seen much discussion of Castlevania's Frozen Half (1997, but with roots in 1990). As a Brazilian I had the privilege of playing Akumajō Dracula-kun (today fan translated as “Kid Dracula”) on the Famicom, and I did catch the reference to the boss Galamoth in Symphony of the Night, but somehow this absolutely amazing girl and her implied development went right over my head. I only found out about her recently, and only because the wikis explicitly pointed it out.

Dracula-kun was Konami's own parody of the Castlevania series, back when it had barely even become a “series”. You play as young boy Dracula saving Earth from evil galactic conqueror Galamoth, because it's your Earth and you are going to be its evil conqueror. There's lots of fun jokes and cute references in this fun little game, but one of the jokes is grossly queerphobic. You might have heard of the Japanese folkloric creature Snow Woman (“yuki-onna”), a beautiful, snow-white ethereal lady who appears in winter promising a bit of warmth only to lure men (and, presumably, lesbians) into a deathly icy embrace. Well Dracula-kun has yuki-okama enemies, instead of yuki-onna. “Okama” is a gender identity somewhat close to the Latina travesti or, a bit more distantly, to crossdressers or drag queens: someone assigned male who dresses with fem clothes and performs an exaggerated femininity. The intended joke being that instead of an alluring snow-woman you're getting some funny snow-transvestite. The low resolution of the Famicom spared us from a mean caricature with a beard shadow or something, but the manual illustration made the joke clear.

Then many years later, in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the Playstation 1, there's a beautiful ice witch enemy called Frozen Half, and the in-game lore describes her as a servant of Galamoth—that is, she's working for the alien endboss from Dracula-kun, rather than under Dracula like all other enemies—and still I failed to connect the dots.

Frozen Half's ultimate power, “Saidai Power” (“Ultimate Power”), rains huge chunks of ice on the head of protagonist Alucard. In retrospect, we can see that her voice is intended as a perceptibly transfem voice. Video from completezukan.jp.

The word “half”, or more precisely “new half” (in English in the original), is an outdated Japanese term for trans women, in the sense of someone who has gone through medical feminisation procedures to transition from their assigned gender. This blue-haired lady is none other than the yuki-okama from Dracula-kun! Despite being an intangible spirit she got (ectoplasmatic?) HRT in the time between the two games, and I’m happy for her and I love her.

Todo ser aprenderá / a ter as estrelas como guia…

Though I'm sure somewhere out there there's young folk born too late to have caught anything to do with vaporwave, and who now feel nostalgia for the early vapor scene while having never been there. This thought makes me happy.

Music that was too online

This is a good video for Internet history, randy gives an informed account of the music genre behind the memes and just how quietly influential and trend-setting it was. She missed discussing also that it was born streaming-native, and how new that was at the time. During the vaporwave era the concept of “album” had already been fatally wounded by large playlists, shuffle listening, and incipient algorithmic picks based on listening habits—we would religiously endeavour to connect every mp3 player software we had to last.fm, lest our precious play statistics not get logged, “wasting” a listen—but everyone was still downloading MP3s and listening from their on-device collections. Vaporwave seemed born youtubeing the way that horses are born walking. It was tailor-made for “Late Night Tokyo Summer 2h” compilations that you would put randomly and leave playing in the background. This is so normal now that I struggle to convey how much of a new thing it was; vaporwave felt fake and like a meme because it was an online thing. When lofi hip-hop exploded into the world a few years later, right when the world needed it the most, the reason I kept thinking of lo-fi as “vaporwave but she's happy after transition” wasn't anything to do with the musical similarities between the genres, but because of how much both were online-native, streaming-oriented, Internet-scene genres.

One might think it's ironic that two genres obsessed with analog artefacts and physical media distortion were actually such hypermodern digital cloudborn scenes, but of course that was the entire point.

Madeleines at the edge of your vision

Also missing was that for us natives (millenials) how many layers of liminality that nostalgia had. Much of the nostalgia-play in vaporwave was direct, it was lampshading emotional icons of our teens (mario tunes, windows 95 sound effects etc.) by adding a heavy goo of ostranenie on top, the resulting alienation reflecting the social alienation everyone felt after the End of History ended. And much of it was the anemoia, the nostalgia for something you never experienced—I'm far from the only girl who's heavily anemoic for being a plastic-love sparkly dress urban chic easy woman dancing the nightlife in Bubble Era Japan, despite the fact that at the time I was a child in a rural mountain town the exact opposite side of the world wearing the wrong gender.

But most of it was about the tension that was right on the edge between having experienced and not experienced. It was getting little details that were at the fringes of our lived experiences, that we touched upon indirectly, but never gave a thought about, and putting that on a (faux Greek plastic) pedestal for observation. Vaporwave queered the binary between nostalgia and anemoia: cultural spaces briefly brushed by your consumption habits years ago were rewritten as landmarks to your particular life-story, while the most familiar parts of your history were rendered alien and creepy and estranged.

For example: I had never listened to citypop before future funk brought it to everyone's attention, except it was also what I grew up thinking of as “the type of j-pop they use in anime and tokusatsu songs”, which means it had been a seminal part of my childhood all along, but only like, specific versions of it. The “UFO” song that that one pair of aidoru-impersonating sisters would sing every Imin Matsuri, that kind of thing. I still distinctly remember my shock when the wave of what I thought of as “new style” anime came along—that was Naruto, One Piece and Bleach—because suddenly the musical style of anisong had changed overnight, leaving me bereft of that particular high I'd get from the songs in Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya, Tenkū Senki Shurato, obviously Sailor Moon etc. I had never experienced citypop; at the same time I was intimately familiar with citypop, I could sing several citypop songs before I even knew Japanese.

Similarly, like most people who live in Most Of The World, I had never been to an USA-style shopping mall. The equivalent in my country and social class hit us as “fancy”—curated, full of cops, above all financially inaccessible—in a way completely alien to the USA teens hanging out at the mall, who would never begin to dream a context where “McDonalds at the mall” was a fancy rich people thing you might experience once on vacations with your rich aunt and you'd talk about to your schoolmates with the reverence one talks about an once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disneyland. So the “empty mall” melancholic ostranenie shouldn't have hit me.

Except of course I knew the USA mall intimately, from dubbed sitcoms playing on the background during lunch, from low-budget Saturday Morning USA cartoons that were a precursor of Tiktok feeds and AI slop with their recycled animation loops and reused plots and unchanging status quo, from the strange funhouse mirror of real-life Brazilian high-school dynamics that was fictional USA high-school dynamics, as filtered with a 10-years delay by theatre kids turned into television writers with a grudge against “jocks” (a category we didn't have).

Most of all I knew the “mall as third-place to hang out” from suggestion, from connecting the dots through its inversions and parodies and distortions: the way it appears in Japanese-produced americana like Earthbound, for example, or in the original zombie movie by Romero, and a thousand other B horrors I watched religiously with my cool madrinha on Coffin Joe's Cine Trash. The USA mall was defined by implication, by its absence.

🏬 👩‍🚀 🔫 👩‍🚀 “Wait a minute, the shopping mall is empty?” “Always has been.”

As a genre defined by its interest in cultural artefacts only ever experienced indirectly, vaporwave is weirdly meaningful music for everyone in the Global South; its referents were already estranged for all of us in the periphery of the world, living stuck halfway between the material reality surrounding our bodies and the conceptual reality we got from Imperial media, both of which felt both native and foreign at once. When you exist in two places at the same time you're a kind of ghost, and ghosts are attracted to haunting music.

A soundtrack of personal mythology

Finally, the throw-everything-at-a-wall nature of the overload of samples and reused fetishistic symbols meant that vaporwave often felt targeted for you in particular. It's like cold reading in fortune-telling.

My brief time at the USA was defined much more by the extinct Google Phoenix than Mountain View itself, whatever bond I made to the land was between me and the desert hills of Arizona, surrounded on all sides by sprawl of what is probably the worst city in the world. I was left with an unexplainable affection for Arizona, and the biggest symbol of it for me was the Arizona Green Tea, which was so cheap at the time and fit that era of my life so perfectly. I can't even drink it anymore cos I'm vegan now, and I certainly will never be able to step in the USA safely again, so Arizona Green Tea is the ultimate symbol of unattainable nostalgia. How did vaporwave know?? :surprised_pikachu:

(or was it the idolatry of Arizona Green Tea in vapor aesthetics that rewrote my memories, giving it a larger space in my recollections of the Google Phoenix era than it actually had in reality? It's impossible to know, which means it adds up to the same.)

Nostalgia has since became the normal modus operandi of consumerism, in a kind of desperate, child-like denial of the return of fascism. But back when vaporwave did nostalgia, the subculture had noticed this tendency when it was still an incipient little whisper, and immediately pushed it up to 11, on purpose. Not so much as a political project of “criticism” per se but mostly to see what happened; to see what it would feel like; to indulge. The connection to accelerationism isn't unmotivated: vaporwave criticised consumerism by surrendering to it all the way. Wouldn't it be nice to somehow live in the palm-tree beaches of those old TV commercials? No; upon a moment's reflection, it would be depressing as fuck; but what if we went there anyway. The next 15 years would be defined by entertainment megacorps slowly milking that idea bit by bit, when vapor had already explored every conceptual nook and corner of the nostalgia-space within 6 months of its arrival. Punk has struggled with being dead since at least half of its existence, but vaporwave was born dead; it's an undead genre from the start, zombies drifting blankly at the bankrupt mall they had only ever seen on TV.

Notice that reading 法 as “fa” and interpreting it as “fascism” is non-standard, and a borrowing from Mandarin. I think it works well with the meaning of 法 too, but if you're using those slogans you'll need furigana. If you want clarity you might want to just replace the kanji by katakana ファ (反ファ = hanfa is already established, or maybe gloss the entire 反法 as アンティファ). I'm not very satisfied with any of these solutions, but most of the others I think work well. 也 in a yojijukugo is nonstandard, as is the go'on reading “e”, but I couldn't resist the direct parallel with Kurmancî.

• 反法警報 hanfa-keihō, Alerta antifascista
• 全警凶人 zenkei-kyōjin, All cops are bastards
• 全警標的 zenkei-mokuhyō, All cops are targets
• 恋同行罪 rendō-kōzai, Be gay do crimes
• 抗戦命也 kōsen-mei'e, Berwxedan jîyan e
• 夜友暗抱 yayū-anpō, Die Nacht ist unsere Freundin und ihre Finsternis umarmt uns
• 民合無敵 mingō-muteki, El pueblo unido jamás será vencido
• 反法雁行 hanfa-gankō, Faşizme karşı omuz omuza
• 放火全獄 hōka-zengoku, Feuer und Flamme allen Knästen
• 戦女生女 senjo-seijo, Frauen, die kämpfen, sind Frauen, die leben
• 妄動必覚 bōdō-hikkaku, Fuck around and find out
• 女命自由 jo-mei-jiyū, Jin jiyan azadî
• 無境無国 mukyō-mukoku, No border no nation
• 不義不平 fugi-fuhei, No justice, no peace
• 突破絶不 toppa-zeppu, No pasarán
• 無君無臣 mukun-mushin, No servants no masters (*actually present in Chinese anarchist Bào Jìngyán in the 3rd century!)
• 単答革命 tantō-kakumei, One solution: revolution
• 衆全我無 shūzen-gamu, Para todos todo, para nosotros nada
• 和舎争堂 washa-sōdō, Peace to the huts, war to the palaces
• 我全反法 gazen-hanfa, Siamo tutti antifascisti
• 不舞不革 fubu-fukaku, Without dance no revolution

Adapted as closely as possible from the booklet of the first OST CD: https://musescore.com/user/119935283/scores/34682984

To circumvent the various restrictions of musescore dot com (e.g. transpose without logging in), you can also download the Musescore file here . (If I forget to update this version in the future, ping me on mirrorwitch (at) transmom (dot) love .)

An all-female bōsōzoku gang posing in matching outfits for a “Teens Road” reportage, 1995.

I'm being silly, of course. First of all, don't get in brawls with your bokutō, you'll probably end up banned from every dōjo forever. Also, more importantly, there’s better ways to brawl. Sukeban-wielding bokutō may be iconic in pop culture but this was never much of a thing, as far as I can tell at least. Wooden weapons kinda suck, and there's not much reason to rely on one. If you're an adult criminal in Japan you'll surely get a gun, if you can't get one, then a knife or machete, like any other thug anywhere. If you're a teen criminal engaging in brawls it's more common and practical to use the good ol' lead pipe. For individual self-defence the pepper spray remains the queen of tools, and also won't get you in jail for years, which is usually a worse result than being beaten up by bigots. So fighting on the streets with wooden swords is mostly an anime aesthetic thing. I mean we do have documentation of bōsōzoku tokkōtai posing with bokutō (such as the above) and they always look cool as fuck doing that, but perhaps the entire point was to look cool as fuck and nothing else. In my heart I still like to imagine that sword-wielding girls have beaten up assholes sometimes at some point, but realistically that's probably a fantasy.

Still, we're martial arts nerds and we can't help but wonder about the technicalities of things like this. If you had to defend yourself and you had a bokutō at hand and you knew how to wield it, that would surely be better than a random stick, which is surely better than going at it bare-handed. (Russian antifas, who have plenty of experience with street violence, say confrontation outcomes mostly follow the hierarchy of tools; physical strength or combat skills can only very rarely break the balance, in the large majority of cases blunt weapons beat bare-handed, edged weapons beat blunt weapons, and guns beat edged weapons; my own (limited) experiences with urban violence were also like this.)

The bokutō of course is not meant to be a weapon, it's a training tool, it's as blunted as you can blunt a weapon made of solid wood. But if that's all you have, how you would use it? A little bird told me delinquent-style bokutō adapts it for combat with three basic techniques:

1. Reverse grip. Go Rurōni Kenshin and flip the blade backwards. This feels awkward to swing at first, but it's easy to get used to. The back of most bokutō is thinner than the blade side and more angular, so it concentrates more power per area and does more damage.
2. Reverse tsuki. Without a blade, most slashing attacks have little stopping power. The biggest deterrent you have is the tsuki. This gets supported by the much sharper point at the back when wielding it in reverse grip. Your goal is then to go for tsuki (on throat ideally, but face or torso probably will deter them well enough on shock alone), maybe with a distraction strike to arms or head first.
3. Half-swording. In indoor spaces, alleyways etc. a bokutō will often be too long. But since there's no blade, nothing stops you from holding it further up to reduce the range and use kind of like a jō. You can also do jō-type moves like pivoting to hit with the tsuka, to a limited degree.

Other than that the usual techniques of wielding a sword will transfer. A properly pivoted sword strike will have the tip moving much faster than humans can react to; use that to your advantage.

One vulnerability of the bokutō is that it's easily grabbed. I experimented a bit with a bō (actually a flag pole) with a friend, and found out that if a resisting opponent gets a good lock on your stick, with mechanical leverage rather than just muscle power, I find it super hard to break free of their hold, even if I'm physically stronger than them—and in a self-defence situation your enemy will almost always be stronger than you (i.e. a man). I'm sure there must be techniques that bōjutsu/jōjutsu people use to effectively break free of a locked grip, but it's not something I could independently rediscover, so if you're interested in that I advise training some type of quarterstaff, arnis or cane self-defence. If I was using any type of stick or long weapon against an attacker, I would try to stay on the offensive to overwhelm them before they could try stuff like this—if you show any sort of fear or hesitation I'm afraid your weapon will just get seized, and now your harasser has a weapon.

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).