Since I started this blog 6 years ago, I’ve published more than 150 posts and pages … only about the Japanese Bamboo flute shakuhachi! Which is not really a popular topic according to Google trends, algorithms and all the bunch of digital numbers rating our lives. But this is my life journey with my shakuhachi flute and I’m happy to share it. I’m even more happy if it inspires others – shakuhachi players, flutists, musicians, non-musicians, anyone.
So what happened on my blog in 2022, according to the analytics? What did you, readers, read and like most? Which of my posts written in 2022 became the most popular?
In July, my student Christof Zürn, creator of Music Thinking, interviewed me for a podcast about shakuhachi. You can listen to it here .
Earlier this year, we prepared the interview with having an improvisation session in nature, that we recorded. Christof mixed some moments of it in the podcast and I published a short video on my YouTube Channel. We had fun with the geese flowing by, pieces of trees falling on us… We also played Kyorei together. Watch it here:
Shakuhachi belongs to nature
A few days after the podcast was released, I found a very interesting paper about Japanese music, written by Akikazu Nakamura. I already had the deep conviction that honkyoku music takes another dimension when played outside. This paper confirms my experience and gives some very interesting insights about Japanese music, that are important to know in order to improve one’s understanding of playing Japanese music. Here is a short summary and analysis of Nakamura’s paper.
When comes the end of the year, let’s take a moment to look back, reflect and celebrate accomplishments!
Shakuhachi Milestones
What milestones did you reach this year? What new pieces, techniques, did you learn? Can you be grateful to yourself for your efforts? (and your teacher’s?) Even holding on to your practice is already an accomplishment. More, (more pieces, techniques, etc.) is not always necessary. Or was it blowing RO? Gaining in awareness? Listening to yourself? Releasing excess tensions? Is there anything related to shakuhachi, even small, that can you celebrate?
Other milestones
Think about your work, your personal life, your social life,…, what milestones can you celebrate?
Do Less
Doing less can also be an accomplishment: what things, thoughts, did you let go of that didn’t serve you anymore? Did you make space for new things, or just made space for… more space in your life?
Five Milestones
Could you pick up (up to) five milestones and celebrate them? What were the five most important things for you this year?
Allow me to celebrate with you my top 5 shakuhachi milestones!
I don’t know for you, but for me 2021 is being even more challenging than 2020. Or is it that, thanks to my meditation and shakuhachi practice, I become more and more aware of my own stress? And others’ stress as well?
In any case, I would like to give a follow up to the two posts about Stress and Shakuhachi that I wrote last year (Part 1 and Part 2).
In those posts, I wrote about the stress you can experience while playing shakuhachi (or any other music instrument) in front of others (teacher, public performance,…) and how to practice to reduce it.
In this post however, I’d like to address how the wisdom of shakuhachi can help you in your daily life to become aware of your own stress… and work on it.
There is something mysterious in shakuhachi, mysterious and profound. Is it in the sound? Is it in the notation? Is it in the music? I remember the lessons with Fukuda Teruhisa sensei, when we were avidly listening to his explanations with the hope of understanding the music and the notation a bit better. I am not talking about how to play the piece technically. I am talking about how to play it properly and uncover its secrets. It could sometimes seem unclear because it asked us to listen even more carefully to our sensei, to the music and to ourselves. Playing shakuhachi is a quest towards one’s self. It is much more than making sounds with a flute.
In the history of shakuhachi, there is a strong shift: when the shakuhachi went from being a spiritual instrument to becoming a music instrument. It was at the end of the XIXe century, during the Meiji era. Actually it was a dreadful period for Zen Buddhism, thus shakuhachi. The Komuso monks were not allowed anymore and had to give lessons and concerts to survive. The shakuhachi took its part in chamber music with koto and shamisen to play “sankyoku“. Apparently the zen tradition was still allowed in a couple of temples (to be practiced secretly?) and after some time, was allowed more officially again. I am not an historian so forgive my approximations in this story.
What inspires me is how the shakuhachi survived this transition: opening to the outside world. Like it followed an underground stream to reappear further, when its time had come again. In the meantime, the Tozan school of modern shakuhachi was born and Japanese music was more and more influenced by the Western culture.
And then, in the 1960’s, shakuhachi was almost dead again. Shakuhachi master Yokoyama Katsuya realised that the shakuhachi had to be brought further to the outside world, meaning outside of Japan. Shakuhachi reached the USA, Australia, and later Europa and the rest of the world, other Asian countries included. The interest for traditional shakuhachi in Japan is still low (please correct me if I’m wrong here), but still exists. And shakuhachi has reached different of styles of music: jazz, pop music , movies, video games, etc.
Yet, the spiritual tradition is still alive and has been developing more and more outside of Japan as well. This is fascinating. It makes me wonder whether you need a balance between the inner and outer world to embrace shakuhachi fully. If so, how do you find this balance?
The two last months I have been quite busy recording videos in the nature (read previous blog post about it here). It started a bit out of frustration: concert halls desperately closed for so long, impossibility to make plans to work in the short run, living on the hope that it would get better after the summer when most people got vaccinated to start to perform again,… But hope is not enough and I couldn’t just stay put and wait for the situation to improve. The current pandemic has given me the opportunity to challenge myself to find other ways to create and still go on, like creating a virtual Dojo on Patreon (visit it here).
Outside my confort zone
Some artists in bigger structures and/or better network manage to organise live streams, I don’t. Luckily I love birds and birdsongs. Playing and recording in nature turned out to be a very nice activity yet challenging. It means playing in the cold, in the dark, in the rain, in the mud, in the wind, without the supportive acoustic of a concert hall or any amplification… It means going out of my comfort zone and letting go of my blockages. It means playing by heart. But it also means being surrounded by birdsongs, enjoying space, deep inner peace, being present to everything happening. This is so rewarding!
In this post, I’ll describe how I pushed my limits and I’ll give some tips to play by heart.
It has been already one year and it is also Spring time again, like last year, when everything closed down. From last year I remember the urge of going outside after months of rain and suddenly the emptiness of the streets. I remember contacting people to find concerts and suddenly all events cancelled. I remember wanting to make more (Dutch) friends and suddenly having to avoid people on the streets. I remember going in nature and feeling suspected when I sneezed because of allergies…
When this second year of pandemic started, it was Spring again and Spring shows you how strongly life goes on. Birds are singing, trees begin to bud, timid flowers come out of the ground, you cannot miss it. As I am lucky enough to live close to nature, I have started a new project: playing shakuhachi outdoors and filming it. Watch it here.
Hélène Seiyu 聖 優 Shakuhachi 