Learning music aesthetics through imperfection: The transmission of shakuhachi music
In a long-standing debate over how to value composition versus improvisation, the two musical concepts often appear as rivals — two irreconcilable aesthetic entities. Yet Andy Hamilton offers a useful alternative in his essay from 2000, proposing a “fluid contrast between a composed work and improvisation.” Here, “improvisation” and “composition” sit at opposite poles of a continuum and “denote ideal types or interpenetrating opposites.” This framework resonates, and one tradition that may be seen as standing between these two ends is the shakuhachi honkyoku repertoire — pieces originally played by ō monks (bshakuhachi-playing Zen monks) during Japan’s Edo period (1603–1867). These compositions are notated in a way that affords space for variation, and performers treat the scores with a significant degree of flexibility. Equally important is how the teaching process has adapted to handle this openness.
In Western classical music culture, a composed work is typically considered something approaching perfection — a product of the composer’s mastery, the time and effort spent refining the score, and the work’s ability to be replicated. From this perspective, the honkyoku tradition might seem to comprise “imperfect” works, lacking precise notation and thus continuity in exact execution. Yet this apparent imperfection can be viewed positively. In the case of honkyoku, what appears is not improvisation in the usual sense but a freedom of expression and interpretation essential to keeping the tradition alive. Most honkyoku pieces have no named composer; transmission is primarily oral, and the scores remain skeletal in detail. The pieces we know today have passed through a long development process involving many contributors before reaching their current shape.
Hamilton notes that an “aesthetics of imperfection … focuses on the moment or event of performance.” For shakuhachi playing, a performance can differ according to space, time, and the player’s guild — even the performer’s physical condition is accepted as a source of variation. Because the score offers no fixed time indications for phrases, length is determined by the performer’s breath at that particular moment, including about the age of the performer — older players may not be as strong, but their experience and emotional expression are valued instead. At the same time, the honkyoku tradition includes qualities linked to an aesthetics of perfection: the pieces are written down and maintain continuity across performances. The notion of timelessness — the same pieces played by ō monks during the Edo period, by modern players today, and by future generations — remains important. Thus the honkyoku tradition contains the set of opposites: “process and product; impermanence and permanence; spontaneity and deliberation.”
The background of the honkyoku
The shakuhachi is believed to have arrived in Japan from China and Korea during the Nara period (710–794). During the early seventeenth century, shakuhachi-playing monks organized themselves within the Fuke sect, a subsect of Rinzai Zen. Their repertoire is now called honkyoku, or original pieces. The Meiji Government dissolved the Fuke sect in 1871, radically reshaping the shakuhachi world. Players adopted the guild system — known as ryto (playing style) or ryeha (school) — common among Japanese art forms. New schools formed between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1892, many shakuhachi self-study manuals appeared, revealing how pitch, scale, and teaching methods increasingly drew influence from European classical music. Today many teachers begin students on study pieces outside the honkyoku repertoire, then move to ensemble pieces or sankyoku; the Kinko Rye school allows only accomplished players into the honkyoku repertoire. Although transmission methods have undoubtedly changed from those of the Zen monks, traditional teaching approaches remain widely used in present-day Japan.
Learning the honkyoku
My own training began with the piece Tamuke. My teacher Okuda Atsuya told me there are no beginner’s pieces in honkyoku. Accustomed to classical Western training, I felt unprepared for the fundamentally different learning process I was about to experience. It became clear from the very first day that the most important pedagogical method is mimesis — playing alongside the teacher. Since Tamuke was my first piece, I played it more than a hundred times with Okuda. Through this repetition together, I was expected to absorb how to play it. Before studying a new piece, Okuda would place a freshly stamped copy of the score in front of me and talk about its background. Then we played it together while he explained unfamiliar fingerings and tricky sections, we played it repeatedly. During following lessons, we played through it together until I felt confident enough to play it alone. If he was unsatisfied, he would join me — silently showing I wasn’t yet ready. Okuda rarely spoke about techniques, focusing on flow and the piece’s distinctive character. My experience matches Deschênes and Eguchi’s description that “in Japanese culture, more often than not, the tacit and the implicit are more important than the explicit.” My teacher was not especially silent, but generally explained techniques only if asked. Much later I discovered that this method, which at first felt slow or ineffective, had a deeper effect — especially when improvising, I realized that shakuhachi techniques, flow, and means of expression had entered my body at an unexpected depth. Yuasa Yasuo describes this phenomenon: in Zen cultivation, whether meditating or performing daily tasks, a student is instructed to assume correct postures into a designated form (katachi, often called kata).
Playing alongside the teacher molds the student into the “form” or kata of the music. The student gradually adopts the teacher’s tone color, flow, tempo changes, and emphasis — most of these elements are not in the score. Trimillos summarizes: “The teacher seldom identifies the error but waits until the phrase is played correctly and then expresses approval … The goal is to perform the piece exactly as the teacher has presented it.” But Cox’s research notes that mimesis in Japan is not about mechanical copying but about acquiring embodied knowledge from a master who is a bearer of tradition. This rings true as a key factor for how honkyoku can be both “imperfect” and classical.
Learning pieces over years — hearing new aspects
Playing together regularly with the teacher allows a student to play like the teacher, at the student’s own level — even if the student only follows the flow while struggling with pitch and technique. Okuda would sometimes invite me to revisit a piece I had learned years earlier, often surprising me. The purpose became clear over time: as technical skill advances, a student can finally hear what was invisible before — differences between their own playing and the teacher’s. Many shakuhachi students mention suddenly discovering something in a piece they had long studied. Once the body internalizes the music, conscious recall recedes; students experience their playing as embodied procedural memory. Bergson described this type of memory as repeated actions that are automatic, inscribed in the body, useful for present tasks. This applies powerfully to shakuhachi playing, where the head, face, upper body, fingers, and respiratory system are heavily involved. Deschênes and Eguchi call this “embodied orality” — understanding how the body learns, assimilates, and personalizes what is taught, not just acquiring theoretical knowledge. Without incorporating the oral dimension, one cannot truly play shakuhachi even from notation.
Notation
The honkyoku tradition sits along the continuum between “perfection” and “imperfection,” involving both written score and openness in interpretation. As Ferruccio Busoni put it: “Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form.” Continuing that line, Hamilton adds that “the aphony of the improvisation a itself is one stop less seiso yTfrom the locus of artistic inspiration.” Notation for shakuhachi existed for at least seventy cents but operates “rather than prescriptive ” scores function The typical school’s narrative focuses on score evidence .Many memorals count large proportion rests only via eyes in common with breath .notation holds count variant in piece figures specifics structure .rather breaks is essentially to be breath determine.
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different pitch on each. Watazumi plays on an instrument tuned to G# (most probably 2 sun) while Yokoyama plays on one tuned to Bb (2.2), and Kakizakai on one tuned to G (2.6).
Although all knowledgeable listeners will recognize all three recordings as Kokū, there are striking differences between the three players’ renditions of the piece. For example, Watazumi completes the first eight phrases of Kokū in 75 seconds, while Yokoyama takes 96 seconds to play them, and Kakizakai 81 seconds.
Variation between performances can also be seen in a specific technique found in the second phrase of Kokū (see Figure 10.1), where the fingering re is played while the index finger simultaneously strokes over the second finger hole from above. Watazumi plays this three times before he opens the third hole and nods with his head to create an effect called furi, thus lowering the note for a short instance before bringing it back to the main note again. Watazumi plays this latter technique twice. Yokoyama plays the first stroking technique six times before opening the third hole and thereafter performs a single furi. Kakizakai plays five of the first before playing one of the latter effects.
This degree of variation between performers is typical and, therefore, is only one example of many, showing just how varied playing is.
The ma between the fourth and fifth phrase (see Figure 10.1) provides a contrasting example of a degree of similarity in performance features. Here all three players rush on to the fifth phrase that begins with a muraiki technique (a strong, windy sound) added to the note: they all take a breath lasting only about half a second. This is fascinating as many versions of Kokū exist that do not begin the fifth phrase with muraiki.
This shows how in a predominantly oral tradition one can often clearly see performance details of a piece transmitted from teacher to pupil, in this case across three generations. However, the strength and length of their muraiki is, once again, another matter. One further point to keep in mind is that one’s teacher will not play exactly the same each time one accompanies him or her. When I complained to Okuda about his playing style changing, he responded in sum: ‘I have just changed the way I play.’ In this way, the potential for a high degree of variation in performance details is transmitted to the student.
Discussion and concluding remarks
I feel it meaningful to posit a continuum between these two musical ideas, as suggested by Hamilton: perfection, in which the timelessness of the work is emphasized (as is often the case in written composition), and imperfection, which focuses on the moment or event of performance (as is often the case in improvisation). I propose that honkyoku can be placed on that continuum, but how close to imperfection or how close to perfection will depend on the performer and guild, as some have more detailed notation than others. As described in this chapter, the transmission methods used in honkyoku promote variation and new interpretations. Hamilton writes that in ‘improvised music, instrumental timbre and instrumental technique are non-standard and more individual’. The same can be said in the case of honkyoku, despite the fact that they are not improvisations but pre-composed pieces.
As with many shakuhachi players before him, Okuda paraphrased the story of the ultimate sound in honkyoku in many of his lessons I took between 1990 and 2000: ‘The supreme sound of the shakuhachi is the sound of the wind accidentally blowing across a decayed bamboo, creating a sound.’ On one occasion he went on to explain that in koten honkyoku nature is the model. It is the sound of the wind, waves of the ocean, murmuring of a river, etc. In short, koten (the word consists of the Chinese characters for ‘old’ and ‘piece’ but is often translated as ‘classical’) does not mean old, there is no music as avant-garde as honkyoku because it is renewing itself all the time. Here his words imply that the changes are in fact a part of the tradition.
It may be no coincidence that a Japanese musical traditional genre tends towards ‘imperfection’ without being improvisation. Saito Yuriko refers to the ‘Japanese appreciation of the aged, the obscured, the impoverished, and the defective as “the Japanese aesthetics of imperfection and insufficiency”’ and describes a culture that cherishes imperfection to the point that great tea masters and Buddhist monks might break masterpieces of art in order to make them even more attractive.
However, the concept of mujō may be still more pertinent here. Mujō is translated as ‘uncertainty; transiency; impermanence; mutability’. In Buddhism impermanence is one of the essential doctrines and one of three marks of existence. Carl Bielefeldt writes in his comments on the teachings of the famous Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Dōgen (1200–53) ‘Lancet of Seated Meditation’ that Dōgen alluded ‘to the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, according to which we cannot step in the same water twice’, going on to say that ‘In a non-abiding dharma, there should be no grasping or rejecting’. Given its strong link to Zen Buddhism, the transmission methods of honkyoku and the attitude towards – or rather the expectation of – change, may at least partly be explained by this background. I see the absence of grasping as not falling for the temptation of wanting the music to be fixed in the same form and thereby insisting on its precise repeatability, while the absence of rejecting I interpret – in the case of honkyoku – as accepting a multitude of variations.
As Hamilton describes, ‘The aesthetics of imperfection thus focuses on the moment or the event of performance, while its rival emphasizes the timelessness of the work.’ Playing honkyoku embraces both sides of the dichotomies drawn by Hamilton, with its strong focus on process as well as on product, impermanence as well as permanence, spontaneity and deliberation.
In his thesis Riley Lee describes very precisely the fluidity in honkyoku performance by explaining the concept of honnin no kyoku – translated as ‘the person in question’s piece’ – as being ‘the commonly held ideal of honkyoku’. In this ideal ‘each shakuhachi must become totally, in every way perceived and unperceived, the piece of each individual performer. Until the piece is truly “one’s very own”, it is impossible for one really to be able to play the piece.’ Lee continues: ‘The process of any honkyoku becoming the performer’s piece may (or may not) include changes in the piece. These changes may range from nearly imperceptible subtleties, such as the timing of breaths between certain phrases, to gross changes, such as the inclusion or omission of entire phrases. […] Furthermore, the idea of honnin no kyoku contains the probability of change with each performance, even after the piece is “one’s own”. Every performance of honkyoku is the manifestation of the entire situation or condition of the performer including the universe of which he is totally a part.’
Hamilton defines the aesthetics of imperfection as ‘an open, spontaneous response to contingencies of performance or production’. This aesthetic approach is reflected in a comment made by Okuda when I played a recently published CD comprising performances by a fellow student. Okuda looked up with surprise and exclaimed ‘But it is played exactly as in the notation! Why then make a CD?’
Although not easy to grasp for the new shakuhachi student, as the teacher will insist on mimesis, honkyoku will float down the river, which ever contains fresh, new water, while remaining the same old river.