Word: koto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Music fills the evening, and the instruments have such wondrous personalities that they sometimes threaten to upstage the cast. Among those played are the mbira, timbila, kalimba, guitar-lute, Lozi drums, tampura drone, bamboo pipe, Japanese koto zither, and double respiratory linguaphone. These vary in appearance from hollowed-out Halloween pumpkins to xylophones seemingly made of baby elephant tusks. The chief players, Andrew and Paul Tracey, are equally adept with bagpipes, clarinets, flutes and tubas. Of the three fetching girls, Dana Valery has a voice of expressive authority and distinctive beauty. She has the show's tenderest numbers, folk...
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...
...koto is Japan's most popular traditional instrument. Brought to Japan from China in the 9th century, it is fashioned out of blond paulownia wood. It has 13 strings stretched over sliding ivory bridges that must constantly be shifted while playing in order to retune and change keys...
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...