導き Michibiki: the path to Japan

Ranjo (photo by Fran Marshall)

Thank you for taking an interest in this subject. I hope through this blog to be able to introduce you to the Satsumabiwa, the lute originally played by the samurai in the region of Satsuma, present-day Kagoshima Prefecture, though now played throughout Japan and also by myself here in Ireland, too. This post introduces the start of the journey.

Michibiki is a word which can describe the sense of being led in someway, being brought to a place or a state of mind one did not expect, in many cases.

I’m classically trained on piano, flute and organ. I began learning piano at a young age and I have little memory of a time where music was not part of my life. I work as an organist today in Dublin, though the decision to play organ was not my own. I was a member of the Schola Cantorum at St Finian's College in Mullingar and was expected to learn organ.

I detested the instrument for the first two years, however after three years of trial, it began to grow on me and it continued to occupy more and more of my heart from there on.

At 18, I applied to become an organ scholar at Cambridge University. Although my choral skills were non-existent, I felt confident about my organ playing and had prepared Messiaen’s Dieu Parmi Nous from La Nativité du Seigneur, a piece I still enjoy today. I was selected by Emmanuel College and I travelled to Cambridge to take up my role as Junior Organ Scholar in September 1991, studying organ with Peter Hurford and reading Music.

An encounter with the universal

On a chapel choir tour to Haarlem in the Netherlands at the end of my first year, I popped into a record shop to browse around and kill some time. It was there I happened to hear for the first time a recording of Yokoyama Katsuya playing Shakuhachi. *

I had never heard anything like this before. I was utterly fascinated by the sense of limitlessness it seemed to evoke. One might say that this was achieved through its non-metered rhythmic structure. I couldn’t disagree.

Nevertheless, something more seemed to be happening, as the music felt not like a melody played, but rather like a language spoken or a scene narrated.

Yet, at the same time, there was a complete absence of a sense of a performer trying to say something through music. Rather I was led to feel as though the player was a vessel through which a language, universal at a subconscious level, could be encountered.

Ethnomuscology – a discipline from a safe distance

The following term, I elected to study Ethnomusicology. The course was for one term under Dr. Ruth Davis and focused on the music of North Africa, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.

I elected once more to study Ethnomusicology for the third year. This time, the course was for the full year and supervised by Dr. Colin Huehns, who had just completed his PhD on the music of Northern Pakistan the year before. The course also focused on the music of China and Japan, emphasising its context in the literature, art, and history of both cultures.  I welcomed this opportunity and engaged enthusiastically with it.

I joined the Cambridge University Anglo-Japanese Society and made friends among Japanese students visiting Cambridge to get to hear how Japanese people thought about their culture.

Meeting the biwa

During this year, I heard biwa for the first time, played by Tsuruta Kinshi as well as November Steps for orchestra, biwa and shakuhachi, composed by Takemitsu Toru and performed with Tsuruta and Yokoyama Katsuya.

The music of the biwa was so distant from what my understanding of music was to this point that I could not comprehend it. The percussive sounds of the plectrum striking the body of the instrument, the string tone without a pure tone, the voice seeming to come from another dimension. I felt it was difficult to call this ‘music’. It was much more of a challenge to engage with this in comparison to my experience of Yokoyama Katsuya playing Shakuhachi.

This resonated with a position argued by some participating on the course that Japanese Culture had a tendency to a deliberate disfigurement of beauty in its art and music which points to the imperfection of the everyday reality one inhabits rather than the beauty of an ideal. In the case of music, an example of this might be deliberately causing the string to produce a noisome timbre, avoiding the purity of a sounding string, through the use of sawari. **

From the perspective of the Western eye and ear, I could understand this. However, in speaking with the Japanese friends I had made, they did not accept this point of view.

I realised at this point, that I had not heard a Japanese person speak about the music of their culture, or had a Japanese person demonstrate their instrument and explain what they found special about it to me. I had not played a Japanese instrument to see what the experience of making music within this culture could be like.

I strongly desired to visit these places, meet the individuals within the context of their lives and learn from them directly.

To Japan and the search to get within

I applied through the Japanese Embassy in Dublin to join the JET programme. I was accepted and asked to select what Prefecture in Japan I might go to. In the College Library one evening, I choose by opening an atlas to the map of Japan, closing my eyes and pointing at the map. This turned out to be Gunma Prefecture. A couple of weeks later, I found myself on the way to Japan to take my position on the JET programme in Yoshii town, Gunma Prefecture.

I felt a providential hand in my choice of Prefecture, as it turned out that there was a strong tradition of Japanese music with sankyoku (shakuhachi, koto and shamisen ensemble) in the prefecture. Moreover, in Yoshii town I was introduced to Wakabayashi Shundo, a senior student of Araki Kodo V, the fifth-generation head of the Shakuhachi School of playing.

The Shakuhachi is an end-blown bamboo flute with a wide bore traditionally with five finger holes. I had played flute since I was nine and felt I could get somewhere with the shakuhachi. Nevertheless, it took a few weeks before I could produce a sound and even longer to become able to sustain it. However, after a struggle, I managed to learn the first piece everyone learns which is called Rokudan no shirabe and I began to play in ensemble with the koto after a few short enjoyable months.

First encounter with a biwa master

One day in early December, Mori Kenroku, the principal of the school I was working at, approached me and told me that he wanted me to participate in a weekend course of traditional Japanese music taking place just on the outskirts of Yoshii town. It turned out that there was (uniquely, I believe) an Art College specializing equally in Western and Traditional Japanese Creative Arts and Music less than two kilometres from my apartment.

This College, Takasaki Geijutsu Tanki Daigaku (Takasaki Art Center College), had been established by a very foward thinking educator in 1981 but was unfortunately brought to ruin by his successor by 2013. In December 1994, this seemed a very healthy and flourishing institution with a beautiful Japanese garden with tea houses and a suikinkutsu.

I learned that I would be able to choose from Shinobue or Nohkan traverse flutes, koto zither, shamisen, taiko drums, shakuhachi flute or biwa lute. I don’t know what made me choose biwa, however, I instinctively said that’s what I wished to do.

A few days later, I was collected from my apartment by a fellow staff member and went off to the College. Initially there was what I presumed to be an orientation which I did not understand a word of. Then, I was told to go to a particular room on the third floor. It was there I met Fumon Yoshinori for the first time.  An elderly man of 83, he appeared slight and small, however he was very steady on his feet and had no problem taking the three flights of stairs to the study room.

I had no Japanese essentially, but once Fumon discovered that I could speak a little German, his face lit up and he began to address me in German. Thus, my first lesson on Satsumabiwa was conducted through German. That weekend was one of immense discovery for me.

*

I have retained the Japanese name order for names with surname followed by given name.

**

Sawari is the technique of constructing an instrument in such a way that the timbre of the instrument is changed by making the overtones more prominent than the principal tone.