Perry Yung is a performance artist and shakuhachi maker living in New
York City.
He is currently living in Tokyo studying for several months on a
fellowship with Sogawa Kinya, a shakuhachi performer and maker there.
Perry is making me a jinashi long flute (2.8), and we are wrestling
with the inherent contradictions of hole placement on long flutes:
strive for ease of playability or equal temperament (the latter
neither defined nor considered within ancient shakuhachi
tradition...). It has been a challenging and very interesting process
working with hole placement with a maker at a 5,000 mile remove.
Thanks be to Fuke for email, digital cameras and JPEG documents!
At one point, after having constructed my own flute model from a
large dowel, then marking Perry's "ideal" (theoretical only...) hole
locations on it, working
with them to come up with some hole locations and offsets to suit my
hands, and sending him pics of my efforts and being told, "Yes, we
can do that, but this note will be flat, or that note will be sharp,"
I opined that perhaps I was asking for too much; that I just can't
have it both ways. Perry immediately sent me the following of an
experience he'd just had:
"Funny you should ask. Just today, at Sogawa san's, we
were talking about how one would not be able to tell
if a flute was good or not from a cd recording.
Especially, if it was played by a very good player.
Then Sogawa san pulled out a cd he had just burned
from a computer recording he made at a friend's place.
Last weekend, while BBQing in the woods, he made a
shakuhachi out of a dead piece of bamboo he found. He
cleared the nodes and made the fingerholes with a hot
metal rod. Laurie (Sogawa-san's wife) said the utaguchi
was burnt and jagged edged, not an even crescent. This
thing didn't play in tune or even have a good sound
since the inside wasn't completely filed down."
"But, when he punched the play button and announced "Choshi".
I was instantly spellbound. It was the best Choshi
recording I've ever heard (and I've heard quite a few in my
short years in the shakuhachi world). I can't even
begin to describe it but it was like the first time I
ever heard the shakuhachi, I mean really heard it."
"Sogawa san said that it was really tough to play but
the effort that it took to play the thing in pitch
made the sound really compelling. He went on to say
that Watazumido sounded so fantastic becasue he always
stuggled to play his poorly made flutes in pitch. Then
he laughed."
I love that story...
eB
--"Take the only tree that's left, and stuff it up the hole in your culture..." --Leonard Cohen
=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>= Ed Beaty Boulder, CO edosan@boulder.net 303.415.1238 =<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=
****-_-_-_ ^..^ > /\ /\ "Buzz"
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