Sawai Kazue in performance

Sawai Kazue, Avant-Garde Kotoist
From The Japan Quarterly January-March 1993

Sforzando, a musical term meaning an explosion of sound, suits koto master Sawai Kazue well. Her style is dynamic; when she plays, she leaps around the koto, her arms and body moving powerfully above the strings, seemingly defying gravity. Known as one of Japan's most outstanding bass koto players, Kazue's performances of this instrument are the most impressive to observe. Here, the contrast between her deceptively small body (she weighs 39 kilograms and is 150 centimeters tall) and the massive 17 string bass koto, more than six feet long, is awe-inspiring. I first saw Kazue, now 51, perform in 1984, in one of those incredibly clean, new concert halls that one finds in the most incongruous of places in Japan -- this one in Nagaoka, a town in northern Niigata Prefecture. I had looked forward to the event for months; the Sawai name is one of the biggest in the koto world. Sawai Tadao, Kazue's well-known husband, is an accomplished stylist and composer. He appeared on stage subdued and elegant, dressed in a black kimono: the image of the serene koto master. Music flowed gracefully from his fingers, and his calm face never changed expression. When Kazue joined him on stage to play, I did a double take and the audience stirred. She was wearing a black leather skirt and tall, tall boots. When she began to play, all previous notions of a koto recital as something calm and controlled, something restrained and reserved, were suddenly shattered. I had never seen anyone play with such intensity. She brought the bass koto to thundering life. This instrument -- normally so subdued, its low rumbling resonance in contrast to the koto's high-pitched sharpness -- suddenly had something of its own to say. While her husband calmly played, the sounds gliding out like a waterfall, Kazue worked her instrument like an athlete, sweat dancing off her brow. We had all come to see Tadao, but we ended up watching her.

Kazue's style reflects her belief that the koto should not be played because it is an ancient instrument that represents the old Japan but because it is a great instrument that can be adapted to the present. Kazue explains it this way: People in Japan always think the traditional is something that we must be dutiful to, but I view that as an insult to this wonderful instrument. It is so versatile, so adaptable -- this is still so much to discover about it, it isn't time to put it away yet. The koto is just coming into its own.

Indeed, the instrument is more flexible than many imagine. Despite the limitations of the 13 strings, the bridges can be moved to allow for any number of creative tunings, and numerous traditional and new picking and fingering techniques offer dramatic changes in timbre. The calm yet strident tone of the koto prevents its sound from being dominated by many Western instruments, giving it a place in a wide variety of musical settings. For ths not popularized until the 17th century when Yatsuhashi Kengyo (1614-1685), a blind musician, devised various playing techniques and scales that increased the koto's diversity and appeal. Because of its beginnings as a court instrument, however, the koto is still viewed as a somewhat elite instrument. The highly structured iemoto licensing system applied to all the traditional arts has also perpetuated the exclusive quality of the koto. Under this strict hierarchical system, students must remain in their place, not move forward too quickly, imitate more than create, and pay the price, both in terms of time and money, before moving on to the next step. This dictums are why the iemoto system, while fulfilling the crucial role as the financial pillar for the arts through a pay-as-you-go licensing system, is often seen as a burdensome duty and hindrance to artistic development in Japan. Another factor contributing to the perception of exclusivity is that the traditional arts must be learned through private lessons because they are not taught in the Japanese public school system. These things, combined with Japan's intensely pursued goal of Westernization and subsequent obsession with the West, have relegated the koto and other traditional arts to an obscure corner of Japanese society. IT is from this corner that Kazue started. She has focused her life of bringing the koto our of the dark closet. She is determined to make people fall in love with the instrument. According to Kazue, the many shoulds and should nots inherent in anything traditional are suffocating the koto. Japanese, says Kazue, have so many preconceptions of the koto as something outdated, they won't start to really listen unless they are forced to hear it anew. So Kazue makes a point of performing in places where people don't expect to hear the koto. The people who come to koto concerts in Japan are all people who play the koto. I want people to run into it, to encounter it in their daily life as they would and other type of music. They will be listening with different ears. Thus, her performance schedule includes bars in Roppongi, live music bars in New York, jazz festivals, and beer gardens. She can switch effortlessly from playing conventional koto pieces in her blinding white kimono to jamming with a jazz group in her black jeans.

Kazue is convinced that the future of the koto lies in the hands of foreigners, for they are an important medium through which Japanese can rediscover the koto. It took Westerners to come here, buy woodblock prints, and take them home and admire them to make us see what great works of art they are, Kazue points out. Now the Japanese covet American and European woodblock print collections. The same things will have to happen with koto. Kazue backs her belief in the importance of non-Japanese to the future of koto music by commissioning young composers from outside of Japan to write for the koto. Her performances include pieces by a variety of international composers, and her latest recordings feature works by Christian Wolff, John Cage, and Robin Williamson. She also takes works written for Western instruments and arranges them for the koto.

Her most recent release, on compact disc in 1992, includes a piece by Cage titled Three Dances. The work was originally written for two pianos, but on the CD Three Pieces it is played on four bass koto. Cage, upon hearing his work performed on the koto in New York in 1991, wrote Kazue a poem that appears in the liner notes of Three Pieces. The world is just one, he wrote; Kazue's message precisely. She is happy to teach non-Japanese and to encourage them to break from tradition in their playing. She lets them try out their own ideas and urges them to develop an individual style. Although Kazue, as cohead of a koto school, is part of the iemoto system, she prefers to stress the art over the traditional rules. "When we had the idea for holding our own recital, she supported it all the way," says an American who had studied the koto before coming to Tokyo to take lessons from Kazue. Most teachers make you wait years before you can do something like that. By bringing foreigners to the stage -- especially when they have barely started to pay into the system -- Kazue is most likely raising a few eyebrows in the world of hogaku, or traditional Japanese music. I will remember her as the first teacher to see my foreignness not as something to hide but to utilize. You have so much to bring to the koto. Your background gives you a fresh perspective. Use it, don't suppress it, she told me. Kazue sees possibilities rather than prescribed boundaries in her students as well as her instrument. In a traditional art world where one learns through years of painstaking imitation of one's teacher, Kazue's approach to teaching is highly unusual. Although she has definite ideas about playing technique (one of the basics is you work up a sweat), she encourages all of her student to try to find their own sound.

One of the reasons Kazue loves the koto is precisely because the instrument lends itself to expressing individuality in sound. To tell people how to play works against the whole structure of this instrument, she explains. The koto is perfect for making subtle differences in sound The fact that each person does this differently should be something we encourage, not avoid. In Japan, we worry too much about playing things right or wrong, when we should be thinking about expressing ourselves, our individual selves, through the music. For her, each performance should be different than the last. Easier said than done, of course, especially from the viewpoint of someone raised in Japan. But Kazue insists on it with all of her students. I want to be able to close my eyes and know who is playing, she says. Music, she believes, is something that is transient, changing. Maybe today it sounds better to play it differently than yesterday, she muses. The goal should not be to play it exactly the same way every day. After all, you feel different with each day, don't you?

This philosophy gives Kazue a knack for making the old relevant. One of the pieces she performs most often is Midare (Chaos), a work by Yatsuhashi written between 1661 and 1673. Unlike Yatsuhashi's other works, which are structured in a style based on playing first a theme and then variations of that theme, Chaos, as its title suggests, is much more unpredictable in its movement, and although it is as mathematically systematic in its structure as the other pieces, the listener is left with an impression of randomness. In Kazue's interpretation of the work, the piece builds slowly, with each note carefully enunciated, and imperceptibly gains momentum until her hands are flying across the strings, yet each note remains clear, the embellishment of each note as distinct as it was at the beginning. The freshness of her interpretation and the intensely concentrated style with which it is performed, erases centuries. Chaos played in this fashion sounds neither dated nor irrelevant.

The bass koto was designed in the 1920s by koto master Miyagi Michio. Its deep sound was at first used mainly in ensemble works, to balance the sound of the 13-string koto, often in the classical Western oompah fashion. But the last 15 years have seen a change in its role, and more and more works for bass koto have been written, many of them debuted by Kazue. I like the force of sound you can get from the bass koto. There are so many kinds of sounds, she explains, as she pulls, hits, and scrapes the strings. The strings are thick, and require more strength to play than the 13-string koto; her fingers are swollen and callused. Most of her recordings feature several pieces for bass koto. It is an instrument that fits contemporary society well, she explains. Her approach to the bass koto is very physical. It is hard to imagine a more restrained, traditional ;performer utilizing the movement and strength required to play the instrument the way Kazue does. The energy with which she plays reflects today's world of international movement in many directions.

Kazue is working to internationalize koto by sending master-level students abroad to teach. In 1984, she conceived of the idea of starting a koto school in Hawaii. In less than six months, one of her students, Got Makiko, was teaching nearly 30 people in Honolulu. During a tour of the United States four years ago, a faculty member at Wesleyan University in Connecticut expressed an interest in restarting a defunct course in the koto. In her usual sforzando style, Kazue wasted no time in recruiting another teacher to work abroad. Besides these programs, which were both initiated with her funding and handling of the logistics, she currently has teachers in Australia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and on the U.S. mainland. True to her predictions, the koto world abroad has been met with much enthusiasm. It has opened a whole new world for me, says Richard Carlson, a senior. Although he majors in pottery, he finds some correlation between what he is learning as a potter and what he is learning as a koto player. There is such sensitivity to nuance in both art forms, but they both require more sheer arm strength than they appear to at first glance.

Setting up koto schools outside of Japan resulted in a curious phenomenon: Japanese rediscovering the instrument. I never would have considered studying the koto in Japan, says Oumi Chika, a junior who started studying the koto soon after her arrival in the United States. But when I heard it here, it suddenly seemed attractive, and I knew that I could study without worry about all the hassles that you have to deal with in Japan. Both in and out of Japan, Kazue's commitment to musical diversity and willingness to take risks have made her a visible figure. Ironically, some of her critics are Westerners who seem to feel betrayed by her nontraditional approach to koto, for example her playing in Western clothes. She is aware of the criticism and responds: People have played the koto wearing the clothing of their era through the ages. It is not necessary to wear kimono to play the koto. It is necessary to think of the music as something relevant to contemporary society, to life around us. Kazue is also aware of criticisms about the sort of music she chooses to play. But she remains true to her instincts and believes that if the music speaks to her, then she can make it speak to others. Kazue knows people do not always hear the music they expect at her koto performances. But she is interested in stretching her own musical limits as well as those of the koto. Progress is not made without experimentation ... That's exactly what composers were doing when they wrote what we not consider classics, she says. Kazue makes this point repeatedly through word and action. In her efforts to internationalize the koto, Kazue has been focusing her attention on performing abroad as well as in Japan. In the last several years, she has played at the Moers Jazz Festival in Germany, at new music and jazz festivals in Canada and New York, and in France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and Poland. Wherever she goes, she redefines the traditional image of the koto. She is always ready to improvise with local musicians, putting her koto together with saxophonists, bass players, percussionists, flute players, and even dancers. Sawai Kazue is not merely continuing a historical tradition -- she is shaping it.

© Elizabeth Falconer, 1993