5. Sokaku-Reibo ツル の 巣ごもり(Depicting The Cranes In Their Nest)

Yamaguchi Gorō 山口 五郎: A Bell Ringing In The Empty Sky: Japanese Shakuhachi Music (Nonesuch Explorer Series, 1969)

I have heard a fair number of solo shakuhachi records since I first heard this one, some years after it was recorded during Yamaguchi’s residency at Wesleyan in the late ‘60s, and immortalized for outworlders with an excerpt etched on to the gold-plated disc bolted to the Voyager probe. It is also my one reliable answer to the “Desert Island Discs” question, not only because it is my favorite recording of any kind of music, but also because it illuminates that just-for-fun question in the most serious possible way: instead of the futility of trying to retain some grip on your old life by taking some capsule summary of it on a piece of plastic with you, what kind of information structure would best suit indefinite solitude? Not melodies, but unbroken lines with no possibility of harmonic context, let alone any need for one, because more notes would crowd and jostle what is there and brimming over the rim. It is a slip of paper on a pool of water bent in just enough places to make a boat – maybe just one will do. Which not coincidentally is also my one reliable answer to another just-for-fun question: what is art?

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).