Imitating

There are many excellent shakuhachi recordings available these days, and it is now possible to imitate the sound of many different masters. If you are already a skilled musician, you can probably listen to a CD of your favorite Living National Treasure and after a bit of effort replicate many of his techniques, incorporating them into your own playing.

But you will sound like an imitation of a Living National Treasure.

Shakuhachi is less about acquiring a set of techniques, or a bag of tricks, than about finding your own voice. There is no quick way to do this. It requires going back again and again to the most basic sounds -- a simple low octave ro, for instance -- and internalizing them, making them an audible extension of your own body.

Rather than going for a particular sound, just do what your teacher says for a good long time. After a while your own sound will tentatively start to appear. The music is born from kata (form) -- from working over and over again with the the basics of breath, of posture, of relaxation. There is no way to reverse-engineer it.

They used to say it takes eight years to learn koro koro (a crane-like sound using an unusual trilling technique). With today's more articulate sensei and with all the videos and mp3's available, this may no longer be true. However it still takes more than eight years to play a good unadorned long tone, a hard-won sound that is unequivocally and unmistakably yours.