箏
Japanese zither
The koto (箏) is the long zither of Japan: a hollow body of paulownia wood about 180 centimetres long, with thirteen strings each raised on its own movable bridge, plucked with picks worn on three fingers of the right hand. It came to Japan from China in the Nara period and is often called the national instrument of Japan.
- 箏曲演奏会（1966年）第一部Sōkyoku ensōkai, 1966 — side A — A concert of Japanese koto music, 1966 — side A26:20
- 箏曲演奏会（1966年）第二部Sōkyoku ensōkai, 1966 — side B — A concert of Japanese koto music, 1966 — side B19:25
- 思川Omoigawa — River of Memory14:35
- 風の歌Kaze no uta — Song of the Wind10:36
- Oregon Koto Kai — live on KBOOOregon Koto Kai, live in the studio4:14
Liner notes
The instrument
The player kneels with the head of the koto to the right. The body is usually made of kiri, paulownia, and its parts are named as if the instrument were a dragon, from the "dragon's head" at one end to the "dragon's tail" at the other. The thirteen strings were traditionally silk. Today many players use nylon or polyester. Under each string sits a bridge, or ji, and moving the bridges is how the koto is tuned. Only the intervals between strings are fixed, and some pieces move bridges in the middle of the music.
The picks, tsume, go on the thumb, index and middle fingers. Their shape tells you the school. The Ikuta school uses square-tipped picks and sits at a slight angle to the instrument, while the Yamada school uses rounder, pointed picks and sits square on.
How to listen
The right hand does the plucking: single notes, broken-chord patterns, fast arpeggios and sweeps along the strings. Listen to the left hand too. Pressing a string down just to the left of its bridge raises the pitch, so a note can bend upward after it is struck, or be played a step higher than its open tuning. The left hand also damps notes and adds ornaments, and since the Meiji era players have also plucked with it.
In court music the koto has a humbler job. In gagaku it plays set broken-chord patterns with the right hand alone, decorating the rhythm under the wind melody.
A short history
The thirteen-string zither of Tang China, a relative of the guzheng, arrived in the Nara period as an instrument of the court orchestra. In the Muromachi period the musician Kenjun, at Zendō-ji temple in Kurume in Kyūshū, established a koto tradition of his own called Tsukushi-goto. From it, in the early Edo period, came the music now called sōkyoku. The blind musician Yatsuhashi Kengyō (1614–1685) is credited with retuning the instrument to a new scale and greatly widening its repertoire, and he is remembered as the father of modern koto music. The Ikuta and Yamada schools grew from this line.
In the twentieth century the blind composer Michio Miyagi (1894–1956) brought Western ideas into koto music, wrote over 300 works and invented the seventeen-string bass koto. His Haru no umi, "Spring Sea", for koto and shakuhachi, is heard in Japan every New Year.
Start with
The 1966 concert by Namino Torii and Minoyu Otaka, with Steven Otto and Hiromi Sakata, fills two sides: begin with side A and go on to side B. For the koto alongside the bamboo flute, try Kaze no uta, "Song of the Wind", with Yuu Ishii on koto and Robin Eve on shakuhachi.
Questions
- What is a koto?
- The koto is a Japanese long zither with thirteen strings stretched over movable bridges on a paulownia body about 180 centimetres long. It is plucked with picks on the thumb, index and middle fingers of the right hand.
- Where does the koto come from?
- It descends from the Chinese thirteen-string zither, which reached Japan in the Nara period for use in court music. The solo and chamber music most people know today developed from the early Edo period onward.
- How is the koto tuned?
- Each string rests on a movable bridge, and the player tunes by sliding the bridges. Many tunings exist, and only the intervals between strings are fixed, not their absolute pitch.