Leap Day in Durham: The Musicon Festival of East Asian Music

Leap Day today; I asked my husband to marry me, and he said, "What? Again?". Well, if not leaping into marriage, there are other things to leap for joy about.

Kiku Day with some of her myriad
jinashi shakuhachi

Leapin' lizards! How often do you get to hear jinashi shakuhachi and Satsuma biwa outside of Japan? Or even inside of Japan? These two instruments were the first offered in the 'bamboo' themed Musicon Festival concert series at Durham University last night.

The shakuhachi is usually identified as an instrument of Zen Buddhism, useful in inducing meditation. And indeed, the first performer entered the concert hall as a Buddhist monk, in formal dress with the usual tengai basket over the head. The basket is supposed to erase identity, so it would have done no good to take a picture of Kiku Day in that costume. Here you see her relaxed with some of her shakuhachi that do not have a lacquered bore (thus, jinashi, 'no lacquer'). She played several meditative pieces, astounding her audience with the fluttering, plaintive, evocative sounds of the free-rhythm wanderings.

Kiku, a Dane with a Japanese and American background, studied honkyoku, with Master Okuda Atsuya in Tokyo for 11 years. She is a founding member of the European Shakuhachi Society and teaches shakuhachi in London and at Aarhus University in Denmark after having taken a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at SOAS in 2010.

Charles Marshall on the biwa lute,
in formal Japanese dress

Charles Marshall, a consummate biwa lute player of the Satsuma tradition of narrative storytelling, gave us recitation in Japanese of the famous 12th-century hero, Nasu no Yoichi, who shot an arrow from the back of a skittish horse at a fan mounted on an enemy boat during the Battle of Yashima. He also sang a piece once performed by Buddhist monks travelling door-to-door to collect alms. The amazing sounds from the biwa – deep undertones capped with a wailing melody, buzzing bass strings, all punctuated by the slap, slap of the plectrum on the instrument body – were equalled by Charlie's perfect rendition of the Satsuma recitation style, not a trivial accomplishment for either foreigners or Japanese. (His serious facial expression, by the way, is the one expected of Japanese when performing most genres of traditional music - even in happy stories. One audience member asked him about this after the concert.)

Originally an Organ Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Charlie went to Japan as a JET English teacher and ended up spending 14 years there, learning Satsuma biwa from the Master Yoshinori Fumon between 1994 and 2003. He is now back in Ireland pursuing an MA in organ performance while continuing to maintain these extremely specialized and rare skills.