E s s a y
- KOTO - koto -
I wonder who on earth it was who first stretched
a string across a piece of wood and plucked it to
produce a sound since the world of people beganc
It had to have been "Peking Man" I tell myself.
That is what was the very beginning, the headwaters,
of the koto that I love today.
Was that string the tendril of a dry plant? During
a time when there were no other sounds produced other
than those of the natural world; birds and wild animals
crying out or the wind moaning as it wove its way
through the treescI wonder what sort of sound it was.
The source sound of this koto that rang out in a peaceful
world lacking the clamor of human sound and speech or the
noise of towns and machinery. And, how did the natural world,
where trees sigh, respond? When my koto is before me, what
crosses through the edges of my mind is the sound from that time.
It is said that it has been over 3000 years since the basic
form of today's koto came into being: A piece of wood was given
a resonant body, took on the shape of an instrument with strings
formed from bundles of silk thread woven from silk cocoons (in China).
Today, human knowledge is bringing about development and evolution
in countless areas, but for me, it is the instrument that came to
be called koto, that first released its sound 3000 years ago, that
speaks so passionately to me.
I feel a deep-seated yearning to capture the countless and myriad
sounds that this unpretentious instrument of wood has released
into the universe from primitive times to the present, along with
the thoughts of the people bequeathed with these individual sounds.
Kazue Sawai