What Shomyo Taught Me About Playing Slowly
I’ve been looking for shomyo for a while.
Shomyo is Buddhist chanting — the kind that would have been part of the daily soundscape for anyone living in Muromachi-era Japan. The kind of music that hitoyogiri players would have grown up hearing, absorbing without thinking about it. When a teacher told them to add a yuri here, they didn’t need an explanation. They already knew what a yuri felt like, because they had heard it in the chanting, in Noh theater, in Shinto ritual. It lived in their bodies before they ever picked up a flute.
For us, it doesn’t. We come to this music as outsiders, piecing things together from written instructions and the occasional lesson, without the cultural scaffolding that once made it obvious. So I’ve been trying, slowly, to build some of that scaffolding for myself.
My teacher gave us a lesson on shomyo recently, and two things have stayed with me since.
The music sheet
In hitoyogiri notation, a yuri — the gentle repeating of a note, the small wave that gives the music its breath — is represented by dots. Five dots stacked vertically means you play a low note five times before moving on. That’s it. No indication of shape, no sense of how the wave is supposed to rise and fall, whether it should end abruptly or dissolve gently into the next sound.
Shomyo solves this differently. Instead of dots, it draws a line. The line undulates across the page, showing you exactly when the tone lifts and when it settles back down, how long the wave lasts, whether it ends on an upward flick or trails off. It is, in the most literal sense, a picture of sound.
Seeing that line changed something for me. Suddenly the yuri wasn’t an abstract instruction — it had a shape. And that shape was different depending on the season. In Spring, the wave is bigger, fuller, like sap rising. In the interseason — the doyo period I’m in now, those transitional weeks between Spring and Summer — it flattens out. You barely move. You almost hold the note still, and the wave is just a whisper underneath it. Seeing that drawn out made it intuitive in a way that dots never had.
The space inside a single sound
The second thing shomyo taught me is harder to explain, but it might be the more important one.
I like to play slowly. I’ve always known that. But I also have this quiet fear that slow is boring — that if I linger too long on a single note, whoever might be listening will drift away. So I rush, slightly. Not enough to notice, maybe. But enough to keep me from fully inhabiting what I’m playing.
Then I saw a shomyo music sheet, and on it, a single syllable — I think it was “ga” — was taking up half the page. Three full lines, bending and curving, tracing the entire life of that one sound. In contemporary music, that space would hold five or six sentences. Here it held one word, fully unfolded.
It stopped me.
Because what that page was saying, very quietly, is that the sound itself is the point. Not where it’s going. Not what comes next. The note you are playing right now is the achievement. It contains everything.
I’ve heard this idea before — in Buddhism, in the practice of sitting. The instruction to stay with what is, rather than already leaning toward what comes next. But I hadn’t fully felt it in music until that moment. Each note in hitoyogiri music is a finite thing. It has a beginning and an end. It gathers energy, reaches something like a tipping point, and then either fades or turns into something else. Your job, as the player, is to be present enough to feel when that moment arrives. Not to predict it. Not to manage it. Just to be there when it comes.
That is zazen. Not a replacement for sitting — nothing replaces sitting — but the same quality of attention, applied to sound. The same instruction: stay here. Don’t leave yet.
All terrain
I’ve said before that shakuhachi is my meditation and hitoyogiri is all terrain. I stand by that. But what I’m finding, the longer I play, is that the terrain of the hitoyogiri includes this too — this stillness inside the movement, this presence inside the phrase. It’s not a solemn instrument. It can carry joy, and mood, and the particular lightness of a June morning when you take out music you haven’t touched in months and find that your hands still remember most of it.
But it can also hold you very still, inside a single note, for longer than you thought you could bear.
That’s where I want to live, I think. Right at that edge.