Lisa Pham did a little profile of me over at Colours of Bohemia.

I forgot in my last post - the grumpy one - the really nice both-ends-of-a musical night I had in Koyasan. It started in the evening at our hosts’ house when Takeshi - who along with running a cafe, plays any number of instruments - brought out his erhu in the other room. After playing for a while, he handed it to me. I’m a string player by training, so I figured I’d have half-a-chance at getting a nice sound out of it, but the instrument turns out to work on pretty much the exact opposite principles that the viola uses. The bow is totally loose and you pull it up next to the string instead of pushing down onto the string, which means you have to find this perfect level of tension to get just about any sound out of it besides a scratchy metallic wooshing noise. On Western instruments, the problem isn’t so much getting a noise out of your tightened bow on a string - it’s getting an attractive, warm sound. On the erhu, it’s sound, or it’s practically silence. Or nasty, angry-sounding tremolos if you pull really hard and bow really fast.

This was just the beginning of my struggles - (more…)

apparently I should have just gone to New York

Well, I’m back from Japan. It wasn’t a particularly explicitly musical visit, we only made it to one performance of anything and that was kabuki at the kabuki-za, which had some musical features (excellent use of the woodblock, for example) but the act that we saw was not predominantly musical. I also completely failed in my endeavor to hear some live gagaku (more…)