Uploaded July 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Japanese musician and composer Yumi Kurosawa performs on a modern twenty-string koto. This special performance is inspired by three artworks at the Freer Gallery of Art exhibition Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan.
Seto or Mino ware tea bowl - https://asia.si.edu/object/F1900.53/
Landscape - https://asia.si.edu/object/F1998.19a-g/
Bo Juyi Questions Zen Master Bird Nest - https://asia.si.edu/object/F2019.3.7a-g/
https://asia.si.edu/interactives/mind-over-matter/
Since winning the National Japanese Koto Competition and moving to the United States, Kurosawa has performed at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, Blue Note (New York), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), and venues across Europe. She has appeared with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Swan in the United Kingdom (where she premiered Daron Hagen’s koto concerto Genji), and the Houston Grand Opera.
The New York Times called Kurosawa “an inventive, seemingly cosmopolitan composer . . . [who] presents her themes gracefully and then undertakes intricate, sometimes adventurous variations, drawing on a timbral palette that ranged from warm and rounded to bright and metallic.” All About Jazz noted that, when she plays, “the koto’s notes flow like the water of a stream in a Zen garden, building melodic paths in a logic that resembles European medieval and Renaissance music.”
Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan
https://asia.si.edu/exhibition/mind-over-matter-zen-in-medieval-japan/
On view through July 24, 2022
Japanese musician and composer Yumi Kurosawa performs on a modern twenty-string koto. This special performance is inspired by three artworks at the Freer Gallery of Art exhibition Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan.
Seto or Mino ware tea bowl - https://asia.si.edu/object/F1900.53/
Landscape - https://asia.si.edu/object/F1998.19a-g/
Bo Juyi Questions Zen Master Bird Nest - https://asia.si.edu/object/F2019.3.7a-g/
https://asia.si.edu/interactives/mind-over-matter/
Since winning the National Japanese Koto Competition and moving to the United States, Kurosawa has performed at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, Blue Note (New York), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), and venues across Europe. She has appeared with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Swan in the United Kingdom (where she premiered Daron Hagen’s koto concerto Genji), and the Houston Grand Opera.
The New York Times called Kurosawa “an inventive, seemingly cosmopolitan composer . . . [who] presents her themes gracefully and then undertakes intricate, sometimes adventurous variations, drawing on a timbral palette that ranged from warm and rounded to bright and metallic.” All About Jazz noted that, when she plays, “the koto’s notes flow like the water of a stream in a Zen garden, building melodic paths in a logic that resembles European medieval and Renaissance music.”
Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan
https://asia.si.edu/exhibition/mind-over-matter-zen-in-medieval-japan/
On view through July 24, 2022
