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This is a Modern piece .

Roots And Branches appears on the following albums:

Album	Shakuhachi	Koto	Shamisen
Prime Numbers  (Listen)	Neptune, John Kaizan
ROOTS AND BRANCHES 1994 The first movement is from shakuhachi "roots": traditional honkyoku-Japanese scale, free-rhythm, importance of space, deliberately simplified. The second movement has European "roots", specifically, music inspired by 16th century counterpoint. Hermann Battenberg introduced me to some beautiful choir recordings of works by Palestrina and I thought music like that would sound great on shakuhachi too. The last movement features a more rhythmic (American?) branch with some Japanese folk scales thrown in for flavor. Scored for 1.6, 1.8, 2.1, and 2.4 shakuhachi, I recorded all four parts. This was quite an engineering feat considering we had only two 2-track digital recorders, and still managed to record everything in stereo.