Practicing hōgaku. Doggedly.

A bit over a year ago, I submitted my PhD thesis. On that morning, I got up, made coffee and porridge as usual, then started clicking buttons I thought I might never reach. What a moment. I recorded this little video to entertain a couple of friends. I don’t put my life on social media for all to see, and this video feels a bit personal to me, so I am hesitant to share it. And I'm happy with the work and the achievement too. So anyway, here you go.

Before beginning this journey in 2015, I thought to myself, “I got through Geidai, and wrote a masters thesis in Japanese…. PhD in English, won’t be easy, but shouldn’t be too hard.” Man, was I wrong. One thing I learned was that I don't choose the easy path. I also know the contours of my limits in that particular quadrant better than before.

I thought I'd wasted quite a bit of time in the first five years or so, but in hindsight, it feels about right: this work required long periods of experimentation and contemplation. In the final eighteen months, I was working furiously. Each day, it would take an hour just to prime my brain to pick up where I'd left off. And if I’d had a few days off, it'd take days to spool up again.

But, I am really happy with my findings. I never would have suspected I'd find a pattern in the ma of sound and silence, gain such new insights into the structure of honkyoku, or be able to make concrete statements about something as difficult to pin down as musical style. At my completion seminar, Riley Lee (who was on my advisory panel and has himself done a PhD) said he thought that this work ‘would have been impossible’.

There are both theoretical and practical results from this work. For years now, every single performance, practice session, and lesson (whether as teacher or student) has been an opportunity for me to apply the results and learn something new. It works, and it works well.

So many new paths for exploration have opened up right in front of me: timing, breath, gesture, interpretation, tension and resolution, presence. Twenty years in, this puzzle of honkyoku just keeps drawing me in deeper. I struggle with doing shakuhachi as a professional endeavour: feelings of inadequacy, imposter syndrome, not having enough money, performance anxiety, networking, engaging with social media, and so on. But the act of just playing shakuhachi has never felt more rewarding. This does not feel like the end of a process - it feels like the beginning. The only thing to do is keep going.

So that’s what my Substack will be about: shakuhachi performance, practice, research, and pedagogy. I’ll add articles as regularly as I can. Looking forward to interacting with some of you.