Last year, I received an invitation to give a presentation on Satsumabiwa at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts. My preparations for it provided me with a good opportunity to reflect on the first few months' lessons with Fumon in 1996.
Originally I intended to speak in person in Tokyo, however, due to difficulties with my as yet unborn son, the lecture was postponed to a date after his birth and then, held online.
Over the course of two hours or so, I spoke and engaged with questions and comments about my experience with Satsumabiwa, the experience of learning this instrument, the tablature used for the instrumental part, the manner in which the sung part is recorded, and how the instrument is received generally by audiences outside Japan.
There were a number of graduate students, including three biwa players, in the class.
Our conversation during the question and answer time ranged from a discussion of the rhythm of Satsumabiwa to recordings of old masters. Opportunely, I had one recording that a student had been searching in vain for, a recording of Shiroyama made in 1912 by Nishi Kokichi, a favorite player of the Meiji Emperor.
The first lessons
The lessons with Fumon commenced in earnest beginning in December 1995.
Reflecting back on them, one of the themes that I find comes to prominence is that the term Satsumabiwa encompasses so much more than the instrument itself.
During the first few months I worked solely on the instrument. Now, in possession of my own instrument, I plunged into learning the instrumental interludes, beginning with the opening one called Utaidashi.
Cha-chan chan-gi-chan, do-shan gi-ton, cha-chan....
I can still hear in my mind's ear Fumon sing the interlude using kuchibiwa, or mouth-biwa, a mnemonic system used traditionally for teaching.
Next, he plays the first phrase on the instrument, I attempt to follow, gritting my teeth at the pain in my shoulder from holding the instrument, the stinging sensation in my fingers from pressing the strings and the pain in my thumb from misguided plectrum strokes sending shock waves through my hand.
Namings
I wrote down everything I learned in a notebook that I retain to this day.
Things like the different types of plectrum strokes, the scale pitches, how the scale is constructed theoretically, etc. The names of the parts of the instrument interested me greatly as well, though not at the very beginning.
As an instrument played by the warriors, the names of the plectrum techniques had their origins in sword strokes: uchi-bachi, or 'striking-plectrum'; harai-bachi, parrying or sweeping aside; sukui-bachi, scooping up from underneath; kiri-bachi, cutting.

The names of the instruments parts fascinated me, too, but in a different way.
The crescent shaped decorations around the sound holes were called hangetsu, or half-moons, which connected with the ancient world of Central and Western Asia and the Islamic World.
Another part was named after a Buddhist Priest's surplice; another a distant mountain, the side of the instrument was called a shoreline. The neck of the instrument was called the crane's neck or the deer's neck.
None of the names had any connection with the world of the warrior. They seemed to reach back to an earlier era, a time where Biwa was played in the Imperial Court or was recited by blind buddhist priests.
Beyond the instrument...
For me, in these early lessons, Satsumabiwa was very much just about the study of the instrument. I devoured everything Fumon taught me related to playing and began to join up the interludes to form larger musical structures as he instructed me.
However, after some months of this practice, one day in April, 1996, Fumon presented me with the song Horaisan.
I had a severe mental block about singing.
As a child, I knew I didn't have a note in my head when it came to singing. When I was 13 years of age, I was interviewed for a scholarship place at the Schola Cantorum in St Finian's College, Mullingar in Co. Westmeath. It was necessary to present a prepared song as part of the audition. I remember my family having paroxyms of laughing at my attempts to sing "Red is the Rose" in preparation for the big day.
My rendition in the audition was abysmal, as expected, and in my aural test, my attempts to sing notes played on the piano were equally miserable. I just could not get my voice to sing the note. It went everyway and anyway but the right way....
Perhaps I would not have succeeded in getting a place but that one of the panel of teachers interviewing me, Padhraic, discovered I had perfect pitch. Everytime I meet him to this day, he still talks about this with me.
Once in the Schola Cantorum, I had a great desire to join the choir, and one occasion, I sneaked into a rehearsal only for the Director to stop everyone after 5 bars and say, "You can leave now, Charles."
Therefore, when Fumon started encouraging me to sing, I was very reluctant to begin. I explained that I wasn't really interested in the sung part.
Fumon couldn't fathom the thought of not singing. And so, with his constant encouragement, I struggled with it and soon came to realise that the singing is not something separate from the instrumental part. The two were necessary for the art form to be realised. Each made the other possible in effect.
Of course, the way of singing is different. And my experience of singing being non-existent to this point, I was essentially a tabula rasa with no preconceptions of how one should sing. This was to me advantage, I feel.
Falsetto is forbidden in Satsumabiwa and the voice needs to resonate low in the torso.
Fumon. even at 83 years of age had a vocal range extending nearly two and a half octaves without using falsetto.
The higher I had to sing the greater I struggled with how to produce the sound. I sometimes felt like a donkey braying when trying to get to the high notes without switching to falsetto.
Beyond the voice....
The next adventure I encountered was finding some way to understand the meaning of the text of the song. When I showed it to my Japanese work colleagues and acquaintances, they found it very difficult. The Japanese was old, the text of the song contained references to many other texts. This intertextuality meant that a knowledge of a large body of mediaeval Japanese and ancient Chinese sources was absolutely necessary to understand it.
Although Fumon explained the song to me, the whole meaning seemed so foreign to my experience, and that of my other work colleagues, I might add, that I was left with a vastly simplified understanding of what the author intended to communicate to the reader.
All this was a great incentive for me to improve my Japanese. So, I began to study Japanese formally with a private tutor working our way through these texts.
Plethora of intangibles
Through all these experiences, I came to view Satsumabiwa as much more than just a musical instrument. Of course, as an object, it also had the beauty of it's appearance and art work. However, there were so many intangibles beyond this.
Overwhelming to me even today, this plethora of phenomena coming together make up what is termed Satsumabiwa.
My adventure began with the instrument isolated from everything else. Next, I came to understand that even within this limited view, the instrument also was in itself a work of art, that the beauty of its appearance was part of the what is Satsumabiwa.
Next, the thought followed that each instrument had a given name, almost as though the instrument had a soul.
The associations that the names of the plectrum strokes wrought in my mind, combined with the deeper past that was reflected in the names of the instrument's parts further expanded the image of the instrument.
Led to a totally new world when I was forced after some months to start singing, I soon became focused on the texts written in many cases to suit the musical structures found in Satsumabiwa specifically.
Finally there is the content of the songs, written to highlight the virtuous and eschew the viscious, to encourage empathy rather than disdain for others.
All these combined, I came to see as Satsumabiwa.
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