Word: eto
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With a bow to Conductor Leopold Stokowski, a bow to the Philadelphia Orchestra, a bow to the audience in Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, stocky Kimio Eto adjusted his formal robes and settled before a 6-ft.-long stringed instrument that looked like the fuselage of an unfinished model airplane. He bowed again, and a kettledrum thundered to begin the premiere of Modernist Composer Henry Cowell's Concerto for Koto and Orchestra, the first concerto ever composed by a Westerner for the 1,100-year-old Japanese instrument...
Plucking the silk strings claw-hammer fashion with his right hand, Eto drew an incisive, harplike sound from the koto. As if feeling a pulse, his left hand roamed the length of the instrument, deftly depressing the vibrating strings in order to vary tones and lend the tinge of melancholy that is the unique trait of the koto. The opening melody, sketched against a background of moaning strings and sudden percussive bursts, followed the austere style of the ancient gagaku court music of Japan, then shifted in the second movement to a distinctly Western hymnal theme. In the final movement...
Ivory Bridges. Eto, 39, is blind, the result of a fall down a 30-ft. concrete embankment when he was a child in Nagasaki. After the accident, his father, an oil-company executive, decreed that young Eto would devote his life to the koto, adhering to the centuries-old tradition of Japan's great koto virtuosos, most of whom were blind. Eto began studying the koto at eight, a year later went to Tokyo for private lessons with the late Miyagi Michio, a sightless composer-performer famed for creating a new form of koto music based on Western influences...
Cowell has a special affection for koto music. As a boy he lived in San Francisco's Japantown, was serenaded daily with Japanese music emanating from a koto school across the street from his home. When Eto approached him in 1960 with the idea of creating a koto concerto, the composer was immediately receptive. After spending three weeks boning up on the instrument at a koto school in Tokyo, Cowell completed the work in 1962. To study the piece, Eto had to transcribe it from piano to tape recorder to Braille. "Much work," he sighs. Eto hopes that other...
...lumberjack. In 1938 he was elected circuit clerk and recorder for Huntsville (income from fees about $2,300 a year), the first of his long series of political jobs. He enlisted in the infantry in 1942, went through Officer Candidate School, served 392 days under fire in the ETO with the National Guard 35th Division, came home a major. He promptly got himself appointed acting postmaster of Huntsville (pop. 1.150), resigned after he bought a scraggly Huntsville weekly, the Madison County Record (circ. 3,100), which he still runs...