Sonic calligraphy

I often think of shakuhachi music as sonic calligraphy. Starting from a particular form, the piece of music, you create audible “brush strokes.” As in Japanese calligraphy, the artifacts are part of the art: the roughness of the breath, the unpolished sonorities of the bamboo, the rhythms that flow from the individual performer’s ever-changing physical and emotional state. In calligraphy, the final visual product may be almost unreadable as kanji, even as it expresses the deepest meaning of the characters. It is the same in shakuhachi music: no two performances are the same, and the expression is completely of the moment.