Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Hey guys those are beautiful videos, thanks for posting them. They are not "Off Topic" so I'm moving them to "Recordings".

Tempuku is a shakuhachi variant. As you can see in the first video, the orientation of the utaguchi is inverted, facing inwards. I haven't played or seen one, so how this affects things is a mystery to me, except that it's similar to the Quena. Speaking of quena it's a bummer when the dude plays "El Condor Pasa" but before that it was nice.

I have inquired about getting tenpuku and everyone said, they no longer exist but that is belied by the second video. Funny that there's at least one organized group of tenpuku players.

The old timer in that video who plays solo plays a song that is also found on the King Records CD "A collection of unique musical instruments" so it is probably a standard traditional tenpuku tune.

Kiku although tuning is obviously variable, is it supposed to follow the ro,tsu,re,chi, ri pattern of pitches?

I'd like to get one of these, if anybody there in Japan knows how to find me one, please let me know.

Now I remember, so before I go back to sleep:
Tenpuku is 3 nodes 5 holes like the shakuhachi ancestor miyogiri.
So yes, more or less the same kind of tuning like shakuhachi... but I can't recall if there are notation for tenpuku. Modern notation - I am sure but traditional.... don't know?

Tairaku 太楽 wrote:

I haven't played or seen one, so how this affects things is a mystery to me, except that it's similar to the Quena.

I don't see all that much similarity to the quena, except maybe in size and tone. quena image

Tairaku 太楽 wrote:

Speaking of quena it's a bummer when the dude plays "El Condor Pasa" but before that it was nice.

If it wasn't familiar to me, like the Itsuke song he plays before it wasn't familiar to me until a couple years ago, I'd say it all sounded like pretty melodies. Is the disappointment because he's not playing songs idiomatic to Japanese culture? I can sympathize with that viewpoint, but I wonder why I don't have the same disappointment in hearing James Galway's "Japan" albums. For some reason, I don't feel the same "play the music that fits the instrument" mentality that I feel when I hear Western music played on Shakuhachi.

It's a real dilemma, I'm very guilty of playing and working on songs I know (mostly non-Japanese, and understandably, I've had a lot longer to learn the non-Japanese songs). However, when the equivalent comes up in social dance where, say, West Coast Swing dancers will dance West Coast Swing to any 4/4 music instead of the dance that goes along with the rhythm, it's almost blasphemous to me.

Moran from Planet X wrote:

Learning quena would go along way toward making a powerful embrouchure.

I could hammer out a few tunes on quena before I started shakuhachi, and while I feel the experience with it (and several other types of flutes) made it a lot easier to get sounds out of the shakuhachi, it didn't help one bit with the meri notes.

Quena is a much easier instrument. It's easier to blow and you have more finger holes to access the notes. Although I believe the idea of starting with something simple and learning it really well before progressing is a good thing, I'm skeptical about the quena's usefulness for embouchure training. It doesn't require any of that tongue technique that we've discovered is the holy grail of shakuhachi.