Koto & Shakuhachi concert

[davidmdahl]

Last night I attended one of the more wonderful and memorable concerts of my life to date, of performances on koto and shakuhachi at the Portland Art Museum. There were two women who played on koto, and four men played on shakuhachi. One of the koto players is from Oregon and a white dude from Seattle played shak. All the others came from Japan for this event.

I have heard Japanese music before, but no live concerts by world-class masters. The shak players were amazing. After every tune, I could feel the amazement and excitement of the others in the audience. It must be a special occasion to hear duets and trio ensembles of shakuhachi.

Following were the musicians:

Shak.
Teruo Furuya
Kaoru Kakizakai
Kazushi Matama
Peter Hill

Koto
Megumi Kakizakai
Mitsuki Dazai

Best wishes,

David

[calden]

Peter Hill - I've seen him at Folklife before.

My bandmate, James Hunter, did a shak and koto performance at our folk festival a few days ago. That's great stuff, but too slow and dreamy for my ears. Is this what Tang Dynasty music was like?

Carlos

[davidmdahl]

The solo shak stuff was non-metrical and yet very expressive. There were dreamy moments, but every tone color along the entire dynamic range possible on the shak was explored. This is not foot-stomping music, but it was very engaging. The duets with shak and koto were metrical. The modern stuff is much easier to follow than the traditional tunes. The concert as a whole was well arranged and programmed with as much variety as possible with the available instrumentation.

I am not about to abandon Vietnamese and Chinese music for Japanese, but such expressive music played so well was worth putting up with the bad traffic and driving rain. Two friends and I bought the last three tickets, so others had high hopes also. We were not disappointed.

Best wishes,

David

[maryong]

Hi David ! I am new here. Please can you help me ? I would like to know what sort of music was wirtten in China between 1800- 1850.
Appreciate your help.
Mary