This is a fine anecdote from Ed! Yes, Sogawa-san is a fine player indeed
and a beautiful person as well! He would always tell me to leave the
bamboo as raw as possible and work from there. If you have good
technique you can make most anything sound great. But to get there I
think one must start out on a well-tuned and balanced instrument to
develop good habits and sensitivity to pitch (that's assuming you don't
inherently have perfect pitch already!)...
Speaking of Laurie Kaszas Sogawa, she recently put out a wonderful CD of
honkyoku (and contemporary compositions) entitled, "Recognition". She
spent most of 2001 in Hungary teaching shakuhachi at the University
there on a grant from the Hungarian government (the first person in
history to do so.) She was very well received there and the CD was a
result of her experience. She has studied many years with Aoki Reibo and
of course Sogawa Kinya. Webpage:
http://www.fides.dti.ne.jp/~sogawa/englishpage1.html
--Alcvin
>
> 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"
>
> ____________________________________________________
>
-- Bamboo-In #214-130 W. Keith Rd. N. Vancouver, BC V7M 1L5 Canada Tel: 604-904-2069 Email: ramos@telus.net Url: http://www.Bamboo-In.com/al.html"All vibrations indicate a void as there can be no vibration where there is no vacancy." --Patanjali's Yoga Sutras ____________________________________________________
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 06 2004 - 14:09:32 PST