Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Barry Weiss, who's been playing for 25 years, teaches Greg Hughes (right), a co-worker at Minolta. Traditionally, the student sits opposite the master and mirrors his action.

Simply Complex

Early Japanese instrument's music developed into series of meditations

By Mary Ann Cook

One might not think that software entrepreneur Barry Weiss and a 16th-century Japanese monk/priest have anything in common, but that would be a mistake. Weiss has mastered a very rustic instrument called a shakuhachi, a bamboo flute that originated in China and whose music was developed and practiced in Japan by Japanese monks during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The shakuhachi can produce 84 different notes, but to learn them all is a painstaking effort.

Shakuhachi is very much associated with Zen Buddhism, since the earliest music was developed as a series of meditations. "The act of playing each piece is itself a meditation, into which the player aspires to become wholly integrated," Weiss explains. "After a couple of years, the piece becomes your own. Nothing is written down. It's all through teaching."

It was called mystery music in its beginnings, because the priests were thoroughly disguised when they played publicly. Wearing baskets with eye holes cut out over their heads, they would beg for donations for their shrines by playing the flutes.

The flutes have five finger holes but no fixed mouthpiece; the only thing that can produce a sound is breath. Practitioners would say it wasn't just breath but breadth of soul because of the spiritual element that the music calls forth.

How did Weiss, who grew up in a Jewish household in New York, get hooked on such an esoteric pursuit? It was the early '70s, and he and his wife had just returned from living in a kibbutz in Israel.

"We learned to farm, but there were many conflicts and the reality [of living in a kibbutz] was far different from what we imagined it would be. When we got back, I started to study Zen, hoping to find in it what I hadn't found in my own religion. I was seeking something that would be an indirect form of meditation." He found it by accident.

On his way to work at a bakery, he passed a health-food store where a man was playing shakuhachi music outside. Weiss became so fascinated that he called in sick so that he could attend a concert the flute player was giving that night.

After that he was hooked: He sought out instructors and started learning all he could about the art, craft and philosophy of the shakuhachi. Since he worked nights, he could spend most of his days studying and practicing. As he progressed with the instrument, he traveled the world to study with different teachers. And he began traveling to Japan on a regular basis.

When he was teaching graphic arts and printing at the high school level, his summers were free for studying and pursuing all the nuances of shakuhachi. When the graphic arts became computerized, he learned how to use the technology and eventually founded his own company, Silicon Wizards, which was recently sold to Minolta.

Weiss has studied the shakuhachi for 25 years, practices every day, teaches others to play the flute and owns a dozen instruments, but he laughs ruefully when he remembers how advanced he thought himself when he received his teaching certificate in 1983 in Japan.

Today he realizes he had barely scratched the surface. "It may take days, weeks, to produce your first sound. Then to produce another, different sound it may take just as long or longer. You might find a 10-times-better tone one time, but you can't find it again. The only thing you're working with is your breathing."

"Your breath is a barometer on your state of being," Weiss says. "Moods are affected by breath. You can hear how your state is, what is real and what is illusion. When you get into a meditative state, you see things as they really are, not with any preconceived notions. When I'm playing, I'm focused and at peace and centered. You understand who you are. It's very very simple, and it's very, very complex.

"You're making music, and you're also in a different state. You're looking at yourself in a different light. You can slow things down and see where [different emotions] originated. When you play, you see the origins of emotions, where the anger is coming from."

Shakuhachi players can choose music from a solo repertoire of more than 100 pieces. The flute produces a mournful, soul-searching sound.

Talking to Barry Weiss is like imagining a scene from a moody, symbolic Japanese movie, one of Kurosawa's epics. He tells of an incident that symbolizes for him the accidental yet synchronous nature of life. He was traveling to Kyoto with a translator and friend. The two were later than expected in coming from a software show and were eager to get to their hotel.

Because they were late, Weiss didn't take the time to unload his computer to find the hotel's address, but by good fortune the taxi driver knew where it was. Noting that one of his passengers was Asian, the driver put on a tape of shakuhachi music during the ride. Weiss, stunned, pulled out his flute case to indicate to him what a serendipitous coincidence this was.

The taxi driver in turn indicated his own case by his side, complete with shakuhachi. After they got to the hotel, the two players pulled out their flutes, experimented, consulted and settled on a piece they both knew. Here, then, was the dreamlike, unlikely scene: In front of the hotel on a rainy February evening, the Japanese taxi driver and the American entrepreneur played a shakuhachi duet. Take note, Kurosawa.

And there was a further fortuitous fallout for Weiss from this encounter: The taxi driver turned out to be the caretaker for the Kyoto shrine dedicated to shakuhachi, to which Weiss had never been able to gain entrance. Needless to say, on subsequent visits, he was made welcome at that shrine.

In l997 he made the trip to Japan 13 times. But since he now goes there on software business, time constraints often prevent him from seeing any of his shakuhachi teachers while in Japan.

It's no surprise that Weiss has a strong affinity for anything Japanese. What with Japanese prints on the wall and the kimonos he wears when he plays for a formal gathering, it's no wonder settling near Hakone appealed to him when he decided to move his business and his family West.

Add to that the fact that living on the West Coast cuts six hours and one big land mass out of a flight to Japan. The mix of cultures in California was an additional draw. The Weisses lived in Saratoga for five years and have recently moved to Los Gatos.

Weiss would like to play and/or teach the shakuhachi on occasional Sunday afternoons at Hakone, but hasn't approached them yet. He has played at specific gatherings there, such as moon viewings. He teaches perhaps 20 students, some of whom come only a few times a year because they have to work so long on producing the next sound.

Weiss teaches the shakuhachi every summer at a monastery in upstate New York and has for 15 years. He says producing a sound from these primitive instruments is a skill that can be frustrating in the extreme, even for Buddhist monks. It requires a patience almost unheard of in our culture.

Weiss and his wife, Marcia, a nurse who works for Kaiser doing research on high-risk pregnancies, have three daughters: Jamie, 14, a student at Saratoga High School; Robin, a student at San Diego State; and Jennifer, 25, who is married and has three daughters and one son.

This is noteworthy because "my family tends to produce girls. It would be nice not to be outnumbered--when there's a football game on TV, for instance."

While his family scales may be tipped toward the female side, Weiss says playing the shakuhachi brings good balance to other aspects of his life. "Everyone gets their own insights. [The music helps you] be aware, be awake. You never know when you're going to miss a chance."

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