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ABSTRACT
Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world.
Acknowledgements
I owe special thanks to the six composers whose work I discuss. This article would have been impossible without their input and their compositions have helped refresh and reorient my thinking on the shakuhachi. Chloe Alaghband-Zadeh, Graham Browning, Byron Dueck, Angela Impey, Jenny McCallum, David Novak and the two anonymous reviewers of this article all gave much appreciated feedback on this material at various stages. I am also grateful to Georgina Born for encouraging me to pursue questions of musical organicism. The research for this article was supported, in part, by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) scholarship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Joseph Browning is an ethnomusicologist specialising in the shakuhachi, central Javanese gamelan and ethnographic approaches to western art music. He completed his PhD on the transnational shakuhachi scene at SOAS, University of London, UK. His current research at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions includes projects on the shakuhachi and creative and rehearsal processes in western art music contexts.
Notes
1 This includes surveys of twentieth-century compositions, discussions of notation and the reflections of composers and performers (e.g., Day Citation2009; Franklin Citation1997; Lependorf Citation1989; Regan Citation2006; also contributors to Benítez and Kondō Citation1993).
2 On academic writing as mimesis, see Taussig (Citation1993: ix).
3 Shinto is a diverse set of Japanese traditions, ritual practices and beliefs—only sometimes labelled a religion—oriented towards kami [gods or spirits].
4 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes and background information are based on my Skype interview and two lessons with Ramos in September 2012.
5 All re-notations are by the author. Most are simplified versions of the original scores, some of which were written in traditional shakuhachi notation. Curved lines after noteheads indicate glissandi. Fingering diagrams show the thumbhole on the back of the instrument slightly offset from the four fingerholes on the front. Shaded circles indicate closed holes; empty circles indicate open holes. All musical examples are written for the standard size of shakuhachi, which produces the pentatonic set d′, f′, g′, a′, c″. In the shakuhachi schools discussed here, the Japanese names for these notes are ro (d′), tsu (f′), re (g′), chi (a′) and either ri, ha or (in the upper octave) hi (c″/c′′′). Produced with an upright head position and open-hole fingerings, these are referred to as kari notes. Pitches outside this pentatonic set and timbrally contrasting alternative versions of the kari pitches are produced with a lowered head position (altering the angle and distance between the embouchure and the blowing edge of the shakuhachi) and/or partial shading of fingerholes; these are meri notes. There are, however, exceptions to this brief summary. The differences between meri and kari notes are central to honkyoku, although hard to summarise: kari notes are typically louder and brighter and often provide tonal centres, while meri notes are usually softer and breathier. I reference the details of this complex musical system only where they are pertinent to my argument: for example, mention of a traditional note name indicates that a traditional technique is being deployed or reworked.
6 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes and background information are based on interviews and lessons with Franklin in Wackernheim, Germany, in May 2013.
7 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes and background information are based on my Skype interview with Doherty in June 2012, and email correspondence in September 2013.
8 For another example of this idea in the shakuhachi literature, see Blasdel (Citation2005: 42–3).
9 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes and background information are based on my Skype interview with Brown in March 2012.
10 http://www.nps.gov/grca/supportyourpark/selected-artists-south-rim-2010-2011.htm (accessed 20 August 2012).
11 http://rosewhitemusic.com/about-frances-white/ (accessed 17 September 2012).
12 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes and background information are based on my Skype interview with White in April 2012.
13 http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/birdwing.html (accessed 30 April 2012).
14 These ‘songs’ are produced as air rushes over the birds’ outermost primary feathers.
15 For extensive references, see http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/animals/bird/scmi/all.html (accessed 3 February 2016).
16 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/corneliusboots2 (accessed 5 September 2013). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes and background information are based on my Skype interviews with Boots in May 2012 and July 2013.
17 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/corneliusboots2 (accessed 5 September 2013).
18 See note 17.
19 Although such ideas, especially their association with notions of Japanese ‘uniqueness’, have rightly received critique (Edwards Citation2011: 94 and 100; Shepherd Citation1991; Tokita and Hughes Citation2008: 26), they remain pervasive (Browning Citation2016), a topic I discuss later.
20 The boundary status of new shakuhachi compositions—at the intersections between Japanese traditional, contemporary classical, electroacoustic and popular genres—is valuable in revealing conceptual terrain such as this, connecting insights across several sub-disciplines.
21 http://rosewhitemusic.com/frances-white-a-profile/ (accessed 16 October 2013).
22 I use this term to gesture towards a topic, partially taken up in recent studies of musical materiality, liveliness and vibrancy such as Bates (Citation2012), Fraser (Citation2005), Piekut (Citation2013) and Roda (Citation2014), which nonetheless arguably remains understudied in terms of its scope and importance.
23 There are parallels here with Keister's (Citation2004a) argument that involvement in Japanese traditional music ‘shapes’ the individual through socialisation into a school, lineage or other social structure. Interestingly, Keister suggests that this socialisation process involves ‘harmonizing with nature’, because Japanese society (including musical transmission structures) is understood as part of the wider natural order (ibid.: 86–9). Through studying Japanese traditional music, many player-composers have been shaped by some such socialisation process (although perhaps in modified form, as transmission methods adjust to new cultural contexts). This training feeds into their compositional activities, such that learning and writing shakuhachi music represent distinct but overlapping forces in the lives of composers.
24 Prominent authors include Steven Feld, Theodore Levin, Anthony Seeger, Tina K. Ramnarine and Marina Roseman.
25 Ideas about the shakuhachi reawakening the primitive drive to imitate nature in sound give a reflexive twist to the story, folding notions of deep time back into today's musical imaginary.