The history of SRQ goes back to 1972, when Makoto Nakayama started recorder ensemble with his friends. Nakayama says "It was very hard to find recorder players at that time". Nakayama was a member of SRQ until 2008. Yuko Yamada is one of the original members of SRQ and was active until 2014 when he decided to retire from the group. Yamada was a professional recorder maker and he made recorders for the group. Ryuji Tokunaga, who also makes recorders, joined the group in 1982, Keiji Sone in 1983, Haruhiko Saito replaced Nakayama in 2008, and Yasuhisa Uchiumi began playing in the group from 2015.
"Sekishi" is a name of an area, northern part of Hamamatsu city. In 1984, when the group did not have a name, they had to decide their name to apply for an event. The members wanted to have some classy name like "Musica ..." but they did not know Latin so they gave up after five minutes of discussion. The second candidate was "Hamamatsu Recorder Quartet" but no one was sure that there wasn't a group "Hamamatsu Recorder Quartet" yet. So, they came up with a name taken from the address of Yamada's house, where they have regular rehearsals - Sekishi.
The repertoire of SRQ includes renaissance music, baroque music, classical, jazz and popular music, and even cartoon music. One of the very unique things of the SRQ is that the members arrange music for themselves. 80 to 90% of their repertoire are recorder music arranged by SRQ. The music scores arranged by the group members have been published as gSekishi Recorder Quartet Transcriptionsh from a Japanese publisher gRecorder-JPh.
SRQ uses renaissance recorders (466Hz), baroque pitch recorders (415Hz), and modern pitch recorders (440Hz). Sometimes they use more than 30 reorders in one concert. And, sometimes, once or twice a year, someone picks up a wrong recorder at the concert.
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