Ancient Surgical Instruments

(This is the second installment in a short series of entries about my experience studying koto for the past year. The first installment, an introduction and brief explanation of my background, can be found here.)

This writing discusses the basic construction and mechanics of koto. It’s meant to be a small primer for those who want a rough idea of how it works. When I first became interested in koto, I had a lot of trouble finding information like this on the internet. I spent a long time drooling over the instrument, watching a few YouTube videos, but not knowing exactly how it worked (aside from the obvious fact that you pluck the strings and sound comes out). There are a number of additional resources in English, some of which touch on the material covered here, but I believe there is enough unique content here to warrant publishing something like this.

Couple things before we dive in:

1. I’ll be mentioning differences between schools of koto players – Yamada and Ikuta. These schools basically constitute groups of people that sit differently, wear different picks, and use different technique. There are some stylistic and ideological distinctions between them, but also some overlap in repertoire. I’ve been studying for a year, and I still have a hard time telling the difference in audio recordings.
2. I’ve grown up with western music, and have therefore been learning about this instrument through the filter of western music theory. As a result, I’ll occasionally throw around western descriptors – note names, swing, time signatures, etc. – as a way of relating concepts in koto to more familiar concepts in western music. Depending on the composer, a lot of western stuff can show up in modern koto notation anyway. Like language, however, there are some concepts that just don’t translate. I’ll point those out as they come up.

Alright, onward!

Whoa, What is This Thing

The first thing you notice when you see koto is that, as instruments go, it’s pretty big.

About six feet tall. True story.

The wood is scorched, but has no finish. Totally bare. Essentially it’s a big block of wood with strings tied at both ends. You prop the strings up with movable bridges, and the location of the bridge determines the string’s pitch. Moving the bridge to the left lowers the pitch, to the right raises it.

Most koto have 13 strings. Some of them have 17 or 21, and those are awesome, but we’ll talk about them another time. The strings used to be made of silk, but nowadays they’re pretty much always a nylon composite. You can still get the silk ones, but I’ve yet to see any.

Side note: I hear that in Korea they still use silk a little more often. I recall hearing a lo-fi recording of this at one point. Obviously silk resonates a lot less, but it probably sounds pretty cool if you’re up close.

Full-on tangent: Koto came from China hella long ago (around the 7th or 8th century, according to Wikipedia). China has a similar instrument called a guzheng. It has a lot more strings, which are made of metal. Its design is also quite a bit more complicated. Korea, Vietnam, and probably some other countries have similar zithers. They all look pretty different, and their musics are each distinct enough that a casual listener can probably tell them apart. If you’re interested in the sound of any one of them, you’ll definitely get something out of listening to a few discs of each of them.

Anyway, back to koto. Each time you sit down to play, you have to first put your bridges in and tune the whole thing from scratch because, guess what, you can’t leave them in for more than a few hours! (The upside of this is that your ear gets a lot of exercise.)

There’s some good news, though: You can make any scale you want with the bridges! There are, of course, some standard tunings, each with a proper name and a few variations. You’ll need to know these if you’re learning the repertoire. But! If you’re composing / transposing for the instrument, what the hell, tune it however you like, just don’t play Pachelbel’s Canon and it’s all good.

How Does it Handle Pitch?

That said, it’s interesting to look at koto’s standard tunings.

First off, they’re often described as pentatonic. This is true a lot of the time, but I think talking about it this way can easily generate a lot of confusion. There’s a distinction here to be made between the tunings of the instrument and the notes that are played on it. As far as the tunings go, you can simply name all the notes, subtract the redundant ones, and call it pentatonic or septatonic or whatever it adds up to. However! If you’re talking about how many notes get played on the instrument? Damn, son: way more than five.

Side note: Someone recently asked me about something they heard on TV – that everyone in the world has “the pentatonic scale” in their musical vocabulary. I think this is an important distinction to understand: Most (not all) people have some kind of pentatonic scale in their music. However, this does not in any way mean that we’re all playing the same notes, or even thinking of pitch in the same way.

Oh snap! Here comes a:

Theory tangent: Here in American / European music, we’re all up in some diatonicism, which is to say we mostly use about seven notes per octave. The other five notes that are left over after you divide the octave into twelve notes are used decoratively, kind of, and are generally played in a way that accentuates one of the seven diatonic notes. (All of this, by the way, is pretty much only true if you’re playing music that’s like a hundred years old. Oops, sorry! Don’t tell your teachers!)

So anyway, the blues (and therefore a lot of rock music) generally uses a pentatonic scale instead of a diatonic scale. (Why? Different tradition.) This means there are five main notes instead of seven.

However! The pentatonic scales used in blues are not the same as the pentatonic “scales” used in koto! There are some similarities, but only some. (And don’t even get me started on microtonalism.)

Here’s the thing to wrap your head around: Words like pentatonic and diatonic – these are descriptors, not definitions. There is no one pentatonic scale. Which five notes are involved in a pentatonic scale can be fully, full-on different depending on where you go. “Pentatonic” as a scale descriptor means only that the scale involves a total of five notes. That is all.

Anyway, now you know.

So, koto uses a lot of pentatonic-ish scales in its tunings. Some of these tunings have names. The first one you’ll learn is Hirajoshi, which goes, from low notes to high notes:

D, G, A, Bb, D, Eb, G, A, Bb, D, Eb, G, A

That’s right, good old-fashioned western note names! I’ve also seen this scale tuned down so that it starts on G instead of D, and maintains the same intervals between strings all the way up. (This is the equivalent to transposing to another key.) There might be other pieces written for this tuning with different starting notes, but so far I’ve only seen D and sometimes G.

Now, there are a couple quirks here. First quirk: I’ve heard that the minor-2nd intervals (eg A-to-Bb and D-to-Eb) are sometimes supposed to be slightly flat – so, in this case, the Bb and Eb strings would be slightly flat. This is less common than it used to be, especially now that some players are starting to interface with western musicians and instruments. Second quirk: I don’t see this very often, but I’ve played with ensembles where we all tune to “A = 442Hz,” instead of the usual “A = 440Hz.” I think this was to accommodate the shakuhachi players. Not every shakuhachi is tuned to a different reference note, but I’m pretty sure some are. (Keep a file with you in case you happen upon this situation. If a shakuhachi player tells you to tune to 442, just hand him the file and politely ask him to shave a couple Hz off his flute. I’ve never done this, but really how hard can it be?)

So anyhow, roughly speaking you’ve got a little less than three octaves, and (if you don’t bend) the only notes you’re playing are D, Eb, G, A, Bb. That’s five notes, right?

Sure, except you’re also bending hella strings all the time – and not in a wimpy, decorative, oh-I’m-so-sorry-I’ll-get-back-to-our-nice-little-scale-right-away-sir kind of way. Nah man, this ain’t your grandpa’s tonality – it’s some other dude’s grandpa’s tonality!

More about bends later, but just keep this in mind: Composers are not necessarily thinking of this music in terms of adhering to a pentatonic scale. That’s a western-theory thing. You can kind of describe the music that way, but really only kind of sort of not really actually.

All that said, I’ll be real with you: Hirajoshi pretty much sounds like a minor pentatonic kind of affair.

How Does it Handle Rhythm?

As near as I can tell, there are two types of rhythmic organization that koto music is concerned with. There are smaller rhythms that, for western music, constitute pulse and time signature. There are also larger, structural rhythms that can span an entire piece.

First, you’ve got small rhythms. Pulse. Western notation organizes this in terms of bars and time signature – 4/4 or 6/8, for example. Sometimes in modern koto pieces you’ll see bar lines and time signatures in notation, but in many older pieces you won’t see nothin’ like that. In place of it, you get only a series of boxes (boxes, fool!), each divided in half, some with notes of different rhythmic values, and some with rests of different rhythmic values. I’ve seen older pieces that, coincidentally, fit well into a 4/4 pattern, but have no such notation. I’ve also seen modern pieces that frequently switch between what western notation would call distinctively 4/4, 4/8, and 3/8 patterns, but which also have no such notation (super messy to play with a metronome, wow). As near as I can tell, it’s all over the map, totally up to the composer.

Second, you’ve got the larger rhythm of the piece. Sometimes, particularly in older pieces, you will encounter dramatic tempo shifts within a piece. For instance, the first section of a piece may be played slowly, then the second section quickly, then the last couple moments slowly again. Sometimes this is notated, sometimes not. Near as I can tell, with the traditional repertoire, it seems to be generally understood between players which pieces change tempo where.

Lastly, there are some unique rhythmic gestures that you’ll see in notation. For example, you’ll see instructions to:

• Play certain notes not in relation to a sense of metronomic time, but rather right before other notes, and in relation to their timing – kind of like an appoggiatura. (It’s possible to notate this in terms of a swung 1/16th note or whatever, but the end result of playing that swung 1/16th note would definitely be different.)
• Arpeggiate a gesture (that could be interpreted as either chordal or scalar) very quickly, as a single rhythmic unit.

So How Do You Work This Crazy Thing

You can either set it on the floor or on a stand. If you’re on the floor, it’s customary to sit on your legs, but man that hurts. Most people I know use a stand so they can sit comfortably in a chair. However, if you’re a little tall like me, most stands will be a little short, and figuring out what to do with your legs will be kind of an ongoing challenge.

You get three picks to work with, which you wear on your thumb, pointer finger, and middle finger (called first, second, and third fingers, respectively).

Yamada picks are pointy and claw-like, Ikuta picks are square (but sharp on the tips).

I believe this is actually why they sit differently also – so they can get a proper angle without messing up their wrists. Yamada players sit perpendicular to the instrument, while Ikuta players will turn slightly counter-clockwise.

It’s also cool to pluck strings with your other fingers (and/or left hand), no one’s gonna look at you funny for that.

The thumb is the default plucking finger, but there are a lot of leaps between distant strings, and those usually utilize your second or third fingers. In fact, much of the time (at least in the beginner’s repertoire), the notation will specify not only which finger to use, but how to use it.

Yeah, so check this out: There are hell of different ways to hit a note on this thing. Here are a few examples that I’ve seen notated so far:

• Pluck the string backwards. (Like how guitar players pluck up and down, same idea.)
• Move your arm so it’s parallel to the strings. Then with your second or third finger (I’ve heard both), pick the end of the string with the tip of your pick, as fast as you can, regardless of tempo. This creates an approximation of a constant tone.
• With your second and third fingers, make a scratching motion from right to left, on the two lowest strings, almost like you’re violently brushing something off. Let the tones ring afterwards.
• Turn your wrist and press the picks on your second and third fingers up against the highest string, so that your fingertips point toward the floor. Scratch the string with both fingers by turning your hand 180 degrees, then immediately drum on the string with the bands of the picks on your second and third fingers. Continue drumming as fast as you can, regardless of tempo, until notated.
• Being careful to mute the strings so they produce no pitched sound, drag the vertical edges of the picks on your second and third fingers across two strings, kind of hard (the strings won’t break), for maybe 1.5 feet. When notated, go back the way you came, a little faster.

The point here is: There are timbral differences that are notated, which is an interesting thing that sets it apart from a lot of western music.

Now, there are also bends. You bend a note by manipulating the string, with your left hand, from the other side of the bridge. You can bend anywhere between one and three semitones. Bending three semitones sucks, but your thumb gets used to it. As with plucking, there are hell of ways to bend. A few that I’ve seen notated so far include:

• Bend the string before you pluck it. (The result is that you just play a different note.)
• Pluck the string, then bend it and hold it until it’s done ringing.
• Pluck the string, bend it, release it immediately.
• Pluck the string, bend it, hold it for as long as is notated, then release.
• Pluck the string, pause, then bend it.
• Pluck the string, then pull it slightly, then release. (This will move the pitch down instead of up, although I’m pretty sure you mostly use this to achieve microtonal bends, not full semitones.)
• Pluck the string, then pull back and forth continuously for a vibrato effect.

All these gestures sound very complicated when you write them out this way, but if you’re studying with a teacher, you’ll learn all this stuff by watching them do it, and it’ll make sense immediately.

So Now You’re a Koto Expert

That’s not true, but you know a lot more than I knew when I first started!

Up next, I’ll be talking more about notation and tradition.