Last month I was still on my unaccompanied saxophone kick, so I decided to learn a new piece by a composer I hadn’t touched on for several years. Ryo Noda is a Japanese composer who studied saxophone and composition in the US and then in France at the Bordeaux conservatory, where Mai was written. His unique perspective on the avant-garde western music that was dominating saxophone repertoire, particularly in the Bordeaux school, at that time is what makes his music, and Mai in particular, a staple of our repertoire. While other Japanese composers -most famously Toru Takemitsu- have engaged with Western music to create a blended sound world, Noda is unusual in directly referencing a specific Japanese instrument and style of playing.
Most of Noda’s music for saxophone imitates the sound of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute dating back to the middle ages. It is used in folk music and Zen Buddhist meditation. The flutes’ tone holes make a pentatonic scale (think the most stereotypical “Asian-sounding” music you’ve heard) and the player bends the pitch to produce virtually any pitch, including microtones, the notes in between the steps of the chromatic scale. Some western composers’ ears were caught by the microtonal capabilities of the shakuhachi and used it in their compositions; Noda instead uses the saxophone to imitate the sounds of a shakuhachi.
Since a saxophone is built quite differently from a shakuhachi, we have to use a variety of extended techniques to realize what Noda wrote. In the opening passages of Mai, you can hear the most direct imitation of shakuhachi. The saxophonist uses pitch bending, microtones and grace notes to imitate the Zen style idiomatic for shakuhachi flute. This echoes Noda’s earlier music from when he was studying in the United States. Those pieces, the most famous of which are Improvisations I, II and III, are firmly rooted in his idea of imitating shakuhachi on the saxophone.
If contemporary music isn’t your usual fare, it can be helpful to listen to some actual shakuhachi before Mai so that you can listen for the similarities.