Shōga and embodied practice in Yokoyama's teaching

This rare video of Yokoyama teaching was uploaded to YouTube some time back. Even though it’s staged and doesn’t represent what actual lessons were like, it contains something valuable: Yokoyama communicating musical ideas through singing (shōga), and using body movement to indicate how he wants to move energy in honkyoku.

Shōga is an important tool for communication and embodiment at every stage of the pedagogical process. For teaching, it’s often easier to communicate musical ideas through shōga, because it highlights the essential musical elements of honkyoku - contour, timing, breath, and intonation - without the technical distractions of the instrument. When singing, my hands are free, so I can use gestures as well as voice to indicate a range of intra- and extra-musical elements: pitch intonation, dynamics, breath patterns, ma/timing, melodic trajectory, ensemble awareness, physical posture, and so on. And because I can speak while singing, I can insert verbal instructions without disrupting the flow.

Importantly, shōga also gives me another angle for embodying music. When we play a note, we engage many of the same throat and support muscles used for singing. So when you sing, you’re not only practicing sound and melody - you are actively aligning posture, respiration, and sound from a different perspective, thereby refining your body and internalised pitch frameworks. Shakuhachi doesn’t just create pitches for you like many other instruments do; you need to create your own internal pitch intonation sense, and train your body and ear to respond to the demands of that internal sense. If you let the instrument decide the pitch, you’ll probably end up fitting the stereotype many Japanese people have of shakuhachi players: tone-deaf old men wobbling their heads.

If I can sing a honkyoku or gaikyoku phrase accurately from memory, I can reliably play it from memory as well. This is because shōga supports long-term musical memory through what cognitive psychologists call the production effect. Because shōga engages auditory, vocal, and motor pathways separate from those used while physically playing the shakuhachi, it strengthens memory encoding, cueing (knowing the phrase that is coming next), and recall.

In addition to embodiment and memorisation, shōga also shows how the music moves, and can be thought of as a kind of sonic gesture. Gestures we hear in music often reflect the physical gestures that create the sound, built from small, recognisable movement patterns. In that sense, shōga is a sung gesture: the voice traces the same contours and energy shapes that the body will later produce on the shakuhachi. The physical motions teachers use (like Yokoyama’s body movements in the video) work the same way, making timing, breath, and phrasing visible.

Traditional Japanese music performances are full of sonic gestures, micro-motifs that communicate timing and contour. Shōga and physical gesture foreground these sonic gestures, and together they function as mnemonics, making the underlying shape of the music easier to understand before even touching the instrument.

An experience I had some years back illustrates how sonic gesture, singing, and embodiment overlap. I was teaching a workshop with Furuya Teruo present. I sang a phrase, and Furuya sensei interrupted me to say that I play a particular note too loudly, even though I had only sung it. He was, of course, recognising that I had embodied the phrase contour in a particular way, which emerged in my singing just as much as it would in my playing.

For sankyoku music, knowing the lyrics helps to understand how to support vocal parts better with the shakuhachi melody, and increases awareness of other ensemble components. Singing the lyrics is a level of practice that few people will want or need to acquire, but the point is that singing leads to better embodiment and awareness.

Unfortunately, opportunities to engage in processes like these for embodiment are very much reduced outside Japan. Firstly, there aren’t many string players outside Japan (shamisen in particular does not travel well, which is unfortunate because it is often considered the lead instrument), and very few non-Japanese are willing to take on the logistical and musical challenges of sankyoku. Moreover, in my experience, irrespective of the genre, very few shakuhachi teachers outside Japan use shōga in their lessons.

I’ve recently started learning the ryūteki, and at least half the lesson involves shōga. Traditionally, it’s not uncommon for a learner to only sing for the first six months or so before playing the instrument at a lesson. The benefit of shōga for shakuhachi players is just as great, but in lessons, people expect to learn shakuhachi rather than sing, and sometimes they feel self-conscious about their singing, or about making mistakes with reading the kana.

But look, the pitch and sound quality don’t really matter - you either do it or you don’t, and irrespective of the quality of your singing, you will benefit from doing it. Yokoyama wrote (translation mine):

“In my experience, there are no shortcuts. If I had to name one possibility though, the practice of solfege is the best way to gain a deep understanding of a piece. Most people neglect solfege. If one were to teach solfege during lessons, there wouldn’t be enough time, so most people don’t focus on it. Students come to lessons because they want to play shakuhachi. When the lesson is over and they return home, they just practice playing shakuhachi and neglect solfege, even though it’s a potential shortcut.”

(Although solfege and shōga are different things, Yokoyama’s usage here appears interchangeable, since he’s referring to the act of singing honkyoku rather than the Western solfege method.)

Vocalising a sound, whether it’s the kana of the tablature (as in shakuhachi scores), a lyric (as in sankyoku), or a sung mnemonic (as in the case of ryūteki scores) frees me up to engage in body movement and awareness in more ways than I could if just playing shakuhachi.

So, I’ve ended up writing about shōga here, although I was originally intending to write about some of the musical ideas being communicated by Yokoyama. When I first saw this video, I was riveted and shaking, because here we have Yokoyama in his prime, using his body, breath, and voice to communicate honkyoku in a way that visibly and audibly expresses much of what I discovered in my PhD research on San’ya. I’ll leave the musical ideas I heard in this video for another time.