Breath as music: shakuhachi honkyoku

One flute, one breath

The shakuhachi is a thick bamboo tube cut from the root end of the stalk, with four holes in front and one behind. There is no reed and no mouthpiece to hold the sound steady: the player blows across a sharp edge at the top, as you might blow across the mouth of a bottle. That makes it hard to play, and very free. By tilting the head down or up, a technique called meri and kari, the player can bend a note far below or above where the finger holes put it.

The first recording, Honte chōshi, is a shirabe or chōshi, a short piece for "searching out" the sound. It is often the first piece a student learns and the first played in a session, to settle the breath and find the flute's voice. Listen to it almost as a warm-up for your own ears. There is no beat to count. Each phrase is a single breath, shaped from the first touch of air to the moment it runs out.

Monks in basket hats

For about three hundred years this music belonged to the komusō, wandering monks who walked the roads of Japan playing the shakuhachi for alms. Begging flute players already appear in pictures around 1500. In the 1600s many masterless samurai joined them, and they organised as a sect, with the temple Myōan-ji in Kyoto as one of its centres. They wore deep woven baskets, tengai, over their whole heads, and under the shogunate they won the right to travel freely while they played. Their playing was called suizen, "blowing Zen".

The sect had its own story of where it came from. A Chinese Zen monk, Puhua (Fuke in Japanese), walked the streets ringing a hand bell; a man who wanted to be his student made a bamboo flute to copy the bell's sound; and the music came to Japan in the 13th century. Historians now regard this lineage as an invention, written down in 1795 to give the sect a respectable past. It still lives in the music: many honkyoku titles end in reibo, "yearning for the bell".

In 1871, after the Meiji Restoration, the new government abolished the sect, and playing the shakuhachi was banned for a few years. The pieces had been passed from player to player in the temples, about forty of which kept their own collections, so a great deal was lost. What survived did so partly because of Kurosawa Kinko (1710–1771), who had travelled from temple to temple a century earlier, collecting pieces and teaching them to lay players.

The empty bell

The second recording, Kyorei, "Empty Bell", is one of three pieces traditionally held to be the oldest and most sacred, with Kokū and Mukaiji. Its name points straight back to Puhua's bell. Nothing in it is decorated: long tones, one per breath, each left to sound and die away. Riley Lee plays it here; you can go on to its companion, Kokū, "Empty Sky", which a monk of the sect, Kyochiku, was said to have heard in a dream.

An old phrase of the sect sums up the ambition: ichion jōbutsu, "enlightenment in a single sound". Whether the komusō thought of their playing as meditation in the way people do today is debated. Some scholars argue that much of the spiritual picture was added later, partly by Western players. But you do not need the theology to hear what the music does. It slows you down to the speed of breathing.

The space between

Japanese has a word, ma, for an interval or pause, a gap that is felt rather than empty. Shakuhachi players use it for the silence between two phrases. That silence is not measured, but it is not idle either: the next phrase is being prepared in it, and if the player's attention drops, the piece falls apart.

Listen for ma in the last two recordings, both chosen for Kotone by Kakizakai Kaoru. Sokkan, "Contemplating the Breath", stays mostly in the low register, where every note is held and watched. Daha, "Striking Waves", is short and is said to be the melody of a begging monk standing at a crossroads. In both, notice how long the silences are, and how they change the note that follows.

Two players, one teacher

Riley Lee was born in Texas, grew up in Hawai'i and lives in Sydney. Kakizakai Kaoru was born in Chichibu, north-west of Tokyo. Both studied with the same master, Yokoyama Katsuya (1934–2010), one of the great players of the 20th century, and Riley Lee also learned from Sakai Chikuhō II, whose versions of Honte chōshi and of the crane piece Tsuru no sugomori he plays here. This is how honkyoku travels: not on paper but from one player's breath to another's. Step 8 of this journey follows such lines of teachers.

If you want more, Kakizakai Kaoru's longest piece here is Sanya, "Mountains and Valleys". And for a later kind of honkyoku, composed in the 20th century for the concert hall rather than the road, hear Iwashimizu from the Tozan school.

詞語

本曲 honkyoku

“original pieces”: the solo repertoire of the shakuhachi, as opposed to the ensemble pieces played with koto and shamisen

虚無僧 komusō

“monk of emptiness”: the begging monks of Edo Japan who played the shakuhachi under deep basket hats

吹禅 suizen

“blowing Zen”: playing the shakuhachi as a religious practice

間 ma

interval, pause: the space between sounds, which players treat as part of the music

在別處聆聽

• Riley Lee's albums on Bandcamp, including Deep Night and Empty Sky
• Kakizakai Kaoru's own site, with his recordings and teaching