Wild Ways (Vocal Score) for Ji-nashi Shakuhachi (in D and A) and Double Choir by Roxanna Panufnik 4-Part - Sheet Music

SKU: PE.EP71895A

ISBN 9790577007762.

In 2005, ji-nashi shakuhachi player Kiku Day approached me to write a piece for her, as part of her mission to increase the use of the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) in Western classical music. When she played to me, its warmth and huskiness seemed so spookily like a human voice that I decided an a cappella double choir setting of words would best complement it. We found a choir – the Nonsuch Singers – brave enough to enter into this project and Kiku found me the wild and wonderful poems of Ikkyu Soyun, a 15th Century Zen master whose timeless words cover the entire gamut of human emotion and are beautifully translated by John Stevenson. The poems are often very short, so each movement is a compilation of two or three of them.

1. Crazy Cloud was a name that Ikkyu gave himself when in 1428 he finished his Zen training and went his own “wild way”. The movement starts with a boisterous “Noh Theatre”-style acclamation of his nickname in Japanese and the music is “Blown about madly” by shakuhachi and voices alike.

For 2. Love Song, I have used a beautiful and poignant Japanese lullaby called “Edo Komoriuta” (meaning “Lullaby from Edo”, the old name for Tokyo) as a backdrop to two of Ikkyu’s highly romantic and sensual poems. The lullaby is sung in Japanese and the words depict the loss of a little boy’s beloved nursemaid who has gone back to her home. This chimes with how Ikkyu feels at the loss of his true love to another man. 

3. Autumn Night brings together three of the many poems that Ikkyu wrote which mention this season. During my research into Japanese traditional music I was introduced to mnemonics – a form of aural transmission of music through the natural pitch patterns of various vowel and consonant sounds. These “words” don’t actually mean anything but if you try saying the percussion line, Tsu ta po.