The shamisen is a traditional Japanese instrument. As you can see, it is a bit like a banjo, with a long narrow neck and a resonator covered with a stiff membrane. However, the banjo has four or five strings on a fretted neck and the resonator is round. The shamisen has three strings, the neck is not fretted, and the resonator is roughly rectangular. The strings of a shamisen are struck with a plectrum and also plucked by the left hand. Banjo players strike the strings with their finger-nails or with picks and generally do not pluck the strings.
Notice the use of vocal signals and glances during the performance. For the first 20 seconds or so the women are tuning their instruments. The two women then play a unison melody up to about 0:57, then one of them (on the right) gives a vocal signal, they stop the melody and the one on the right takes a solo. I assume it is improvised. At about 2:09 they are playing in unison once again. At about 2:16 the woman on the right begins soloing and the woman on the left stops playing. At 3:49 the soloist gives a signal with her head and they begin playing in unison, for awhile, but quickly diverge, playing parallel melodies having similar rhythms. As far as I can tell, the melodic streams have equal prominence rather than one supporting the other. The two women have obviously been playing together for awhile and have developed routines, routines that require and would reward further analysis. Sometime after 6 minutes or so the two streams converge and they women play in unison to the end. Notice that the tempo fluctuates a bit here and there.
Visual and vibration. Lot of postural control. Facial expression, posture at times, particularly the girl on the right, control focusing on the moving parts. Neutral facial expression, postural shifts, like working in a mask, focuses the mind on the parts of the body doing the work, that have to be co-ordinated, the parts the audience should be focused on.
ReplyDeleteThat's the sense I got at moments on first sight. Western sense from the moments of stillness and postural control.
Make sense.
DeleteFrench physical theatre technique, Jacques Lecoq school. Body, movement, space. Very exacting.
ReplyDeleteI note that you cannot develop a high degree of skill on a musical instrument without paying exquisite attention to your body. As a trumpet playing I attend to: tension in my trunk and buttocks, which support breath control, shoulders and neck in general, hand and fingers for valve manipulation, cheek and jaw muscles supporting my embouchure, tongue position affecting airflow and articulation, and who the hell knows what else. It's crazy.
ReplyDeleteDid you notice that those women had some kind of support over thumb and (probably) forefinger of the left hand to facilitate movement along the neck of the shamisen? It no doubt also facilitates stopping and plucking the strings.
Phenomenal musicianship. Rivals the finesse of playing the violin.
ReplyDelete' tension in my trunk and buttocks'
ReplyDeletesinging instruction ' now squeeze your 'lemon'' (helps with high notes) leave the rest to the imagination. Terse and to the point.
Really a lot of training goes into the anatomical/ movement parts, using the bone structure to project sound. Lungs are mostly filled with air, snatched from the diaphragm.
Requires that you hold a certain posture. Add movement/ dance on top, lot of moving parts. Crazy is the correct term.
Yes I noticed the finger thing. Lot I did not have time to take in.
Really interesting video.
Never heard that instrument or the music, took me by surprise, gorgeous. I use to play the trumpet when I was a kid. Tongue position, with speech (projected is where the habit comes from) I do it automatically when I read or with prose in memory. Like a ghost, muscle memory, getting the exact shape.
Precision required with these things, it's non- stop, alters how you move/ think, just becomes an every day thing or else you really would go nuts with the madness of it all.
p.s I just checked, One of my tutors was trained in France at Lecoq, how I know it, in practice without the back story, but the inspiration is Japanese!
ReplyDelete"Jacques Lecoq wrote in The Moving Body 2002 page 4: “Through Jean Daste I discovered masked performance and Japanese Noh Theatre, both of which have had a powerful influence on me. In L’Exode (Exodus), a performance using mask and mime created by Marie-Helene and Jean Daste, every actor wore a ‘noble’ mask. which we nowadays call the neutral mask. I also have a vivid memory of a Japanese Noh play, Sumidagawa (Sumida River), in which we mimed the movements of a boat while our voices evoked the sounds of the river."
Ira Seidenstein, Lecocq-Complements and Criticism.
Bunraku puppet theatre where shamisen player seems to lead the movement working with tayƫ (singer chanter) in harmony, pulling the strings. Pleasing rabbit hole.
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