The Sho

Title: The piece is not named

Performer: Naomi Sato

Instrumentation: The Sho

Culture: Japan 

While I have been taking a lot of opportunities to show off a certain piece in the past couple weeks, I really wanted to take a step back this week and try to find something that really featured one of the traditional japanese instruments. This instrument is an aerophone called the sho. In Japanese gagaku music, the sho players will sit at the rear of the ensemble. 

Looking back to the readings from this week, I was very intrigued by the chapter "Thinking About Pitch." After reading this chapter, I came to the conclusion that pitch cannot be easily identified in one simple textbook definition. Rather, there are multiple layers that go into the description and definition of pitch. What drew me to searching for music played on the sho was the section on tone clusters. A tone cluster by definition is a vertical set of pitches, without functional implications of chords in the tonal system. The effect of the sho cluster is of a complex chord played on an organ. Without the sound of the sho, the texture of the Gagaku ensemble lacks layers and sound. 

It's funny because before I chose this recording, I listened to a Gagaku ensemble by itself, and couldn't quite hear what instrument the sho was based on the sound of the entire group. Most people think of instruments of only being able to produce once sound at a time, unless it's a keyboard instrument where multiple notes can be played at once. When first looking at the sho, it looks more like a flute then a keyboard instrument to me. This was partially while I couldn't pick out the tone clusters at first. Now that I have isolated the sound of the sho, I can now here its pitches within an ensemble. The sho is often compared to the Irish bagpipes since the bottom pitch of the cluster is always played and occasional melodic pitches occur on top. This instrument is a perfect example of how pitch isn't always what we think it is and it can't always be obviously heard within an ensemble. It can sometimes have multiple layers or tone clusters like the sho that are hard to pick out and isolate the first time they are heard.