mission.japan

I’ve been thinking lately that I’d like to take up a musical instrument. Being a decidedly left-brained person, music is not my strong point, particularly singing. Oddly enough, I’ve been doing a lot of singing over the past several weeks, whether it’s karaoke or singing with the student family group on Wednesdays or even singing during Praise Night with the wireless mic while I run the slides (for which Matt has assigned me the title of “Phantom Mic”, since I sing but I’m hidden away in a corner of the room). Picking out melodies on the piano is always fun, but I can’t do anything with chords. I took a stab at learning the piano a couple of years ago, but I found that my hands were miserably coordinated when it came to having the left and right hands play separate melodies. (In the back of my head I’ve wondered if a DDR-like interface would be useful for learning the piano, but I think my poor ability is more due to lack of talent than anything else.)

Not entirely deterred by this I have been considering other instruments. The popular choice in Japan is the guitar. In the Tsushima church alone we have at least ten guitar players by Pastor Goto’s reckoning. You can wander around ekimae (the high-traffic area around the east exit of the central train station) on any given evening and you’ll find at least one (most likely several) guitarists performing at various places along the sidewalks and underground passages. Japan is practically the guitar country.

I like the sound of a guitar, but let’s face it, we don’t need another guitar player. Plus a guitar is a rather big and unwieldy instrument-what I had in mind was something smaller, and for that matter something in the woodwind family. The simpler the better-I had a three-year stint with the clarinet before high school and came away with precisely zero happy memories from that instrument. The flute has a nice sound, but it’s still too complex. I’ve been thinking about something along the lines of a recorder, something with a very simple, pure tone that will be easy to pick up while still being a challenge to master.

To that end I’ve been looking into the ocarina over the past couple of weeks. I chanced across an ocarina performance on television one afternoon several weeks ago (you never know quite what you’ll find by channel-surfing in Japan), and I was really impressed by the clear, crisp tone. The small size (read: portability) of the instrument is definitely a plus-it gives it the potential to be something I could easily take to the Sports Park on evenings to compete with the other students of music who often practice trumpet, saxophone, flute, or french horn there. Plus there are all sorts of songs that I imagine would sound amazing with an ocarina, such as several melodies from the AIR soundtrack. (Curiously that soundtrack isn’t carried anywhere, either online or at the local animate store. I know it exists, because I’ve seen pictures of it and I’ve downloaded it from a torrent, but I have yet to find a store that sells it.)

The simplicity of the ocarina also shows in the price, so it’s feasible to have a collection in several keys and ranges for relatively litte money. Googling for ocarina manufacturers led me to Sixth Street Pottery, which sells a very nice-looking alto ocarina. Whether they ship internationally I don’t know-I sent them an e-mail asking about that. There’s also a chance I could find something over here, but I’d have to ask around about where to look first.

The only minus I can see about the ocarina is the range. It looks like 17 total notes is the average. The alto ocarina at SSP runs from C to high E, so I know that some of the songs we have sheet music for in the church (like “Shout To The Lord” to name one) would need some tweaking to fit inside that range. Other songs might be totally infeasible-I don’t know yet because I haven’t looked at the music that closely.

And for those of you wondering, no, I’ve never played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, so I can’t say that game has any influence on wanting to take up the ocarina. I’m sure there’s some nice Zelda music available for the ocarina, though.