Hodo 程 — Something like the right measure of things
It’s that time of year again — summer is back, and with it the beautiful Oshiki repertoire. But it’s not just the promise of sunshine that makes it special for me: summer holds a strong nostalgic vibe because it is where I started, two cycles ago. This is my third time revisiting Oshiki and it keeps getting richer and deeper every time I re-open my lesson book.
As I browsed through the pages, a familiar word stopped me. I let myself float away into the chapter dedicated to it — it dawned on me that time had worked its magic: I was understanding things in a new light. Let me tell you about the right measure of free flowing in a hitoyogiri melody — what Omori Sokun described as 程 (hodo), at the dawn of the 17th century.
It helps if we set the scene. The people who played the hitoyogiri were not only musicians. They were readers of Chinese classics, practitioners of martial arts, products of an intellectual culture that understood the body and the mind as connected through breath. This is obvious as soon as you open the old manuals.
Sokun says things like “Give your full attention to the way the nodes (connection between phrases) work, and you’ll improve your playing.” Or “Connect the breath between the nodes, focusing on the role that they play.”
The instructions point toward three related ideas that appear throughout the manuals, and that blur at the edges. Hyoshi, a kind of rhythm leaning toward the particular shape and weight of a phrase as it moves. Iki-tsugi, which refers to breath connections: staying in tune after taking a breath, and knowing where it is and isn’t appropriate to breathe. And then hodo — the broadest of the three — the sense of propriety in the way a piece is played as a whole. As Nick puts it, they are all aspects of the same underlying question: how do you let a piece flow?
Sokun uses the term hodo to explain it: to let a piece flow, you have to feel “the space between full phrases, as well as between tones that finish out a shorter phrase then start again.”
Extracts from Sosa-ryu Shakuhachi Mokuroku and Dosho Kyoku manuscripts. Translations by Nick Bellando. Copyright Hon-On Shakuhachi.
It is tempting to say that hodo is close to the western idea of tempo, but it would remove all the life from it. It would be like comparing the flow of a river to the clicking of a metronome. Yet, even flow doesn’t quite describe it. Hodo points to something like the right measure of things — the sense of propriety in how a piece unfolds, the way a sound wants to be played, the energy passing through it, without it sounding predetermined. In other words, the result is not — and should not be — reproducible. It is a thing of the moment, a living current that changes every single time we encounter it again.
Interestingly, this idea is expressed in a very tangible manner in other art forms. Anyone who has practiced Taijiquan knows the instruction to move from the dantian — the body’s centre of gravity, just below the navel — letting each gesture emerge from there, carried forward by a steady and unbroken breath. The movement does not start from the extremities and work inward. It radiates outward from the source, continuous and smooth, perfectly adjusted to what the present situation demands. I understand hodo as the musical equivalent of this movement.
Hodo is crucial to get a good hitoyogiri sound. It is also the hardest part — the one you can only attain through years of close companionship with the little flute.
But why is hodo so critical for the hitoyogiri specifically? It comes down to anatomy. A hitoyogiri (especially the oshiki size hitoyogiri students begin with) is usually fairly small and thin — smaller than a standard shakuhachi. The air column is narrower, and as a result, the sound is more delicate and less forgiving. A thin thread of air wavers more readily than a full one. It exposes any interruption in the connection between player and centre — or between the nodes of a melody. The shakuhachi, with its richer breath and wider dynamic range, can absorb a degree of instability and still hold together magnificently in skilled hands; the hitoyogiri, less so.
In this sense, hodo is not merely an aesthetic ideal — it becomes, sooner or later, the skill you spend your life working toward.
Hodo is one thread in a much larger body of teaching I’ve been studying since I first picked up the hitoyogiri. If you’d like to go deeper, you can explore lessons directly with Nick Bellando.