I can't help but add in my two cents worth in favor of honkyoku and I'll
start by quickly summarizing the musical places/perspective from whence
I've come. I started playing clarinet in 1960, saxophone in 1962, and
Western classical flute in 1964. By 1977 I was performing full-time and
making a living wage in professional jazz and classical ensembles of
national stature. Throughout that process I embraced and grappled with
the ego-based musical-ideology that I would characterized as "always
striving to acquire more and more technique for playing and composing
music at the extremes of speed, dynamic-range, rhythmic, melodic, and
harmonic complexity." This ideology is what brought jazz from its
lyrical bluesy beginnings to the apex of the complexity-ideal with the
likes of John Coltrane (whom I love), Cecil Taylor, and others in the
mid-60s. Cutting edge jazz musicians were actually carrying forward
that ideology as it was manifest in Western classical music composition
from the age of sacred polyphony (Josquin) to the era of atonal
polyphony of the 1940s and 50s(Schoenberg, Webern, and Stockhausen.)
About 10 years ago, in my life as a wind player and an academic
composer, I felt like I had come to conceptual and ideological wall.
Western classical minimalism - as a reactionary compositional approach -
seemed (seems) unable to express the subtlety, whimsy, and plasticity
that my breath and body were (are) capable of producing, and at the same
time, the push to complexity seemed (seems) like an infantile quest for
more-more-more without regard for what the body or spirit are feeling.
In comes honkyoku - an amazingly evolved repertoire of what have become
beautifully crafted compositions (even from a Western analytical
perspective) - evolved specifically to take advantage of the
shakuhachi's unique and infinite range of auditory subtlety - steeped in
a world view that sees ego not as the fuel for the "more is better
ideology" or as prerequisite for musical success, but as an impediment
to living in harmony with the universe; and therefore, a kind of music
that tends toward contemplative expression rather than the dissonant
adolescent clamoring for attention one experience in jazz cutting
sessions and in the poorly attended concerts of "new music". My heart
is very happy I found this instrument and its music.
Dan
A student of wind and holes.
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