尺八

How to listen

There is no reed and no duct. The player blows across the utaguchi, the angled edge at the top, much as one blows across the mouth of a bottle, and that open design gives wide control over pitch and colour. The five holes give a basic pentatonic scale, D, F, G, A and C on the standard flute. Everything between those notes comes from the lips and fingers. Tilting the head down, a technique called meri, lowers a note, and tilting it up, kari, raises it. Holes can be half or partly covered, and the same pitch can be fingered or blown several ways, each with its own colour.

So listen to how a single note changes as it is held: it may swell, bend, waver or carry the sound of breath. The range is about two octaves, with part of a third above.

Three kinds of music

In the classical solo repertoire, honkyoku, the flute plays alone, often in free rhythm. Most of the old pieces come from the Fuke sect, described below; see shakuhachi honkyoku. The second kind is chamber music: the shakuhachi plays alongside the koto and shamisen in the trio form called sankyoku. The third is folk song, min'yō, where the flute shadows the voice.

A short history

A bamboo flute came to Japan from China in the seventh or eighth century for court music. Eight of these old flutes survive in the Shōsō-in treasure house, but no scores do, and the instrument had dropped out of court music by about the tenth century. A short flute with a single bamboo joint, the hitoyogiri, appeared in the fifteenth century. The shakuhachi played today developed in the sixteenth century and is often called the fuke shakuhachi.

That name comes from the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism. Through the Edo period its mendicant monks, the komusō, wore deep basket hats and played the flute as a religious practice, known as suizen, blowing meditation. The sect held exclusive rights to the instrument. When the sect was abolished in 1871, the shakuhachi became open to everyone. Much of the solo repertoire was lost, and the flute first came back as an ensemble instrument with koto and shamisen. Modern schools followed, among them the Tozan school, founded in 1896.

Start with

For the solo tradition, hear Iwashimizu, "Water Welling from the Rock", played by Iburozan in 2010. For the flute with koto, try Kaze no uta, with Robin Eve on shakuhachi and Yuu Ishii on koto. And for the folk side, Inoue Yuizan accompanies sake brewers' songs from Itami, recorded in 2017, such as the Itami no moto-suri uta.

Questions

What is a shakuhachi?

The shakuhachi is a Japanese end-blown flute made from the root end of a bamboo stalk, with four finger holes in front and one behind. The standard instrument is 1.8 shaku long, about 54.5 centimetres, which gives it its name.

What is the connection between the shakuhachi and Zen?

In the Edo period the shakuhachi was a religious instrument of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism, whose mendicant monks, the komusō, played it as a form of meditation. The sect was abolished in 1871, after which anyone could play it.