Performing, Creating, and Listening to Nature through Music: The Art of Self-Integration

This paper explores the organic dimensions of musical experience through in-depth analysis of Japanese and North American shakuhachi practitioners' experiences of performing, creating, and listening to nature (music) through music (nature). Their accounts of shakuhachi practice suggested that the experience of oneness with nature may be attained in both city and rural environments and both indoors and outdoors. It occurred when they experienced a moment of musical silence in which nature became part of music; when the sound of the flute merged into the environment; and when they embodied the earth energy through the flute.

This paper first provides an aesthetic background of Japanese music that allows for music-nature integration. Second, it provides qualitative data illuminating the powerful ways in which the experience of music corroborates with the experience of nature. At the end, the notion of "self-integration" is proposed as a form of musical engagement in contrast to the prevalent notion of self-expression. The former notion, in particular, captures the harmony between the process of music making and that of nature experience and the practitioners' experiences of mind-body, human-nature integration through musical engagement.