Shakuhachi Notation

Shakuhachi notation names pitches in katakana and marks breath and pitch shading, recording how to blow.

Related

The shakuhachiJianzipu (Qin Tablature)Gongche NotationModern

Shakuhachi notation has no five lines. It writes syllables such as ro, tsu, re and chi, with small marks beside them saying how far to shade the pitch and how hard to blow. What it records is not pitch but method.

Time and place

Japan in the Edo and Meiji periods, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The Kinko school was organised in the eighteenth century by Kurosawa Kinko, fixing its repertoire and notation; the Tozan school, founded in 1896, used numbered notation instead. The instrument itself came from China, a distant relative of the Tang vertical flute, and Japan reshaped it into a single bamboo tube.

What happened

The notation names basic pitches in katakana, one syllable for one fingering, with pitch set jointly by the holes and the angle of the mouth. Small marks indicate meri, lowering the pitch by dropping the head, kari, raising it, yuri, vibrato, muraiki, a heavy breathy sound, and atari, the attack of a note. Most honkyoku have no fixed metre, and the marks give only relative length and places to breathe. Learning passes from teacher to student, and the score is a reminder rather than a complete instruction. The same honkyoku can be blown very differently in different schools.

What changed

Notation became part of the boundary between schools. Kinko and Tozan each use their own signs, so changing school means learning another language, and repertoire and identity are tied together. After the Meiji restoration, Western staff notation entered Japanese schools and ensembles, and the shakuhachi began to be written on five lines. Pitch became fixed, while the slide of meri was hard to mark. In twentieth-century cross-cultural works, composers often set the two notations side by side or leave the choice to the player. Compared with Chinese jianzipu, both put action first, but shakuhachi notation also records breath.

Listen for the turn

The catalogue has no shakuhachi recording, so three related pieces stand in for its pitch world. Begin with the folk version of Sakura, its phrase endings sinking and its fourths leaping, the frame a shakuhachi most often blows. Then the arranged Sakura, and hear how a plucked instrument keeps the same phrasing. Finally Yamada's Japanese Silhouettes, a modern composer writing the traditional scale for piano, pitch fixed and breath and slide gone. Then ask how much a player must supply when the score says nothing about breath.

Related

The instrument is The shakuhachi; compare Jianzipu (Qin Tablature) and Gongche Notation, with background in Modern.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Shakuhachi — schools and notation checked, not quoted
• William P. Malm, Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (Kodansha) — notation and transmission checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.