NOHKAN: Japanese musical instrument

The nohkan is a high pitched bamboo transverse flute that is from Japan. The flute is normally used in traditional Imperial Noh and Kabuki theatre. The musical instrument is manufactured by Kan’ami and his son Zeami in the 15^th century, during the time when two of them were transmuting the Noh theatre forms Dengaku and Sarugaku.

The musical instrument consist of a divided and tapered strips of smoked bamboo or burned bamboo, gummed together to generate a tapering conical bore. The smoking of the bamboo carbonizes it and preserves the bamboo. The split strips of the wood are reserved to place the hard wood surface on the inside of the instrument for maximized acoustics. Some contemporary versions of the musical instrument use an interior coating of tempera paint for this. The splits are gummed together, bound with the use of thin strips of twisted cherry bark and lacquered to create a conical bore. The outcome will be a keyless tube that is about 39.1 cm with an average bore of 1.7 cm wide and there are about seven finger holes.

The musical instrument has an unusual internal bore restriction of approximately 2 mm to 3 mm known as nodo or throat. This throat when combined with the conical bore, gives the musical instrument its distinctive high pitched tune by shifting the overblown notes through venture effect. The instrument also has an oval hole across which the player of the instrument blows, and a head joint plug made up of lead cylinder wrapped in paper and was and fixed inside the tube just above the embouchure hole.

The range of the musical instrument is over two octaves. Each flute is an individual and manufactured slightly different each time by the producer of the instrument, the keynote frequency differs from flute to flute.