The zither family

A row of bridges

Look at a zheng or a koto from above and you see the bridges standing in a slanting line, one under each string. Chinese players call them "goose pillars"; the slanting row looks like a skein of geese. Sliding a bridge changes the pitch of its string, so the player retunes the instrument for each piece, choosing a different scale by moving a few bridges.

The right hand plucks on one side of the bridges. The left hand works on the other side, pressing the string down to raise a note, bend it or make it tremble after it sounds. How much a player bends, and how, is one of the things that tells you which tradition you are hearing.

Many Chinas

The zheng has been played in China for more than two thousand years. Early instruments had about a dozen strings; by the Qing dynasty sixteen were usual, and most zheng today have twenty-one. Old stories say it was made by splitting a larger zither in two, or invented by a general of the Qin; both are legends.

China is large, and the zheng grew different accents in different regions. Northern schools, from Shandong and Henan, are vigorous, and the Henan players bend their notes heavily; southern ones, from Chaozhou, the Hakka communities of Guangdong and Zhejiang, are more delicate. The first recording, Liu Fang's Lotus Emerging on the Surface of Water, is a traditional piece of the Hakka school, plain and calm: the lotus that rises clean out of the mud. You met Liu Fang in step 6 on the pipa. For the zheng as everyday music, hear it played to diners in a Shanghai restaurant.

The koto sings

The koto came to Japan from China in the 7th and 8th centuries as an instrument of the court orchestra. Its character, 箏, is the same as the Chinese zheng. In the 17th century a blind musician, Yatsuhashi Kengyō (1614–1685), reshaped it: he retuned it to the scale of the popular music of his day, still the basic koto tuning, and built a set of song cycles, kumiuta, in which the player sings and accompanies herself or himself.

The second recording is one of these. Etsuko Chida sings and plays Omoigawa, "River of Memory", recorded in New York in 2008. Kumiuta are the oldest layer of the solo koto repertoire: slow, poised, with the voice and the strings each going their own way and meeting again.

Six steps

The last two recordings are a single piece split across two sides of a 1925 record: Rokudan, "Six Steps", played by Hagioka Shōin, a master of the Yamada school, with Chifu Toyose. It is the best-known koto piece and the one nearly every student learns. It has no words. Each of its six sections starts slowly and speeds up, and each begins again calmly.

Tradition credits Rokudan to Yatsuhashi, but scholars think the version played today was reworked by later players in his line. The record is a century old; for the koto in more recent sound, hear a 1966 concert broadcast in California, which opens with another piece in sections for two koto.

Cousins

The other two members of the family are not on Kotone yet. In Korea, an old history says that King Gasil of Gaya had a zither made after the Chinese zheng and asked the musician Ureuk to compose for it; the gayageum, "zither of Gaya", traditionally has twelve silk strings. In Vietnam the đàn tranh, with sixteen strings, plays in the chamber music of the south, đờn ca tài tử. Follow the links below to hear them.

Szavak

古箏 gǔzhēng

the Chinese zither with movable bridges, usually 21 strings today

箏 koto

the Japanese 13-string zither, written with the same character as the Chinese zheng

柱 ji

the movable bridge under each string, slid along the body to tune it

段物 danmono

“pieces in sections”, instrumental koto pieces such as Rokudan

Máshol meghallgatható

• National Gugak Center on Google Arts & Culture: the gayageum
• UNESCO: Đờn ca tài tử, music and song of southern Viet Nam, with the sixteen-string zither and a film