箏と尺八

Koto and shakuhachi are the two voices most people now associate with Japanese traditional music, and they began in very different places. The koto was the domain of the blind musicians' guilds of the Edo period, who taught it as a refined chamber art for the parlour. The shakuhachi belonged to wandering Fuke Zen monks, who played it as a breathing discipline. By the Meiji era the two had met, with the shamisen, in the ensemble music called sankyoku.

This set moves from a kumiuta — the oldest form of koto song, where the player sings and plays at once — through a 1966 broadcast concert that spans three centuries of repertoire, to Sawai Tadao's 1970 duet, which shows how naturally the instruments took to new writing. A solo honkyoku from the Tozan school and a short live set by a Portland koto group close it.

Listen for the left hand on the koto, pressing strings behind the bridges to bend notes. On the shakuhachi, listen for the breath as a sound in its own right rather than a by-product.