Japanese oboe. It has a bamboo body with a reverse conical bore tapering from roughly 15 mm to 10 mm in diameter and is about 18 cm long; the reed adds another 4 cm to the length. There are seven finger-holes on the front and two thumb-holes on the back; the thumb-holes are between the first and second and the fourth and fifth finger-holes from the top. Its range is g' to a''. The body is wrapped with bark and string and then lacquered inside and out, like the ryūteki flute. To form the broad reed, which is played using the lips to control the sound, one end of a length of reed stalk is flattened and shaved to a bevel (as for the European oboe); a cane regulating-ring is fitted over the reed to adjust tone colour and volume. ‘Hichiriki’ is the Japanized pronunciation of the ideograms for the Chinese bili, the immediate ancestor of the modern instrument, which would have entered Japan by the 8th century. The hichiriki is used in gagaku (court music), where it shares the main melody with the ryūteki, and also in native court vocal genres. A softer reed is used for kagura songs, so as not to overwhelm the singers.
The hichiriki is considered very difficult to play. The melody is embroidered with a continuous stream of subtle ornamentation and pitch gliding, effected both by fingering techniques and by embouchure and collectively called embai. The flexibility of pitches, made available by the large reed, makes it difficult to describe the instrument’s ‘basic scale’, and the narrow range does result in some surprising melodic leaps, in contrast to the ryūteki.
An earlier dai-hichiriki (‘large hichiriki’), known from manuscripts, was reconstructed in 1878 and briefly used in the court orchestra, tuned a 4th lower than the hichiriki itself. The hichiriki is similar to the Chinese Guan and the Korean P’iri.
For illustration see Japan, fig.3
W.P. Malm: Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (Rutland, VT, 1959/R)
‘Hichiriki’, Nihon ongaku daijiten [Encyclopedia of Japanese music] (Tokyo, 1989)
DAVID W. HUGHES