Look & Listen: Yumi Kurosawa, koto, with Sonia Coman-Ernstoff

Watch virtuoso Yumi Kurosawa perform and discuss music for the koto, a Japanese stringed instrument, alongside woodblock prints and ink paintings from our museum’s collections showing the instrument in a variety of contexts. She is joined by Japanese art scholar Sonia Coman-Ernstoff for an exploration of traditions pursued through creativity and playfulness at the intersection of sound, image, and text. Since winning the National Japanese Koto Competition, Yumi 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 Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Orchestra of the Swan in the United Kingdom, with which she premiered Daron Hagen’s concerto for koto. The New York Times called Kurosawa “an inventive, seemingly cosmopolitan composer . . . [who] presents her themes gracefully and then undertakes intricate, sometimes adventurous variation