Japenese Traditional

Japanese Traditional music has been made for generations on a variety of expressive instruments. The koto, a 13-string zither, produces perhaps the most distinctive sound as it creates washes of pentatonic melodies with a simple, yet enticingly different beauty. Equally affecting is the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute that can flitter and whisper a listener into a state of deep meditation, and the sho, a harmonica-like reed instrument. Ensembles come in many shapes and sizes, from a few singers expressing a unison melody to a fiercely rhythmic Taiko group beating on their large barrel drums. Gagaku -- ancient, ritualistic Japanese court music -- can be slow and entrancing or piercingly dissonant, but it always holds a spirituality enhanced by the rarity of its performance.