Lesson Blog #1 - Echigojishi (越後獅子)

I'm going to start making an effort to make a post after each lesson. First, this allows me to have a written record of what we covered and any points that I need to consider in my practice for the week. It also allows everyone else to keep track of how everything is coming along. I am also going to try to post the sheet music when I start a new song. So, here is post #1!

First, a quick re-introduction: I began playing shamisen in March of 2012. I received my beginner certification (shoden) in January of 2013. In May of 2014, I was awarded my intermediate certification (chuden). I am getting ready to apply for my advanced certification (okuden) now.

Now for this week's lesson blog:
We began a new instrumental piece this week, "Echigojishi" (越後獅子). This is a piece that was borrowed from the nagauta genre and adapted to jiuta. The score I have was rewritten for a typical jiuta ensemble consisting of koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi. I have an mp3 of a nagauta version of the song that I listened to beforehand - not really looking at the score to see the differences. Upon actually playing the song this week, I saw that they started out the same and then branched off into very different directions. The song has a lot of fluctation in beats per minute. In jiuta, it's hardly ever written as "# bpm" as you'd expect to see in Western music. It's almost always written a little obscurely like "settling down feeling" or "with feeling", etc. I have to make notes here and there since I am not good at reading kanji and to remind myself of what my sensei's interpretation of those phrases was. For example, "with feeling" translated out to a faster pace at that point and "settling down feeling" was a gradual slowing. Overall, I found this piece to be fairly straight-forward, and I don't anticipate that we will spend very long on this one as compared to other pieces.

Sheet music (Echigojishi)

(click on images to enlarge)