Four months ago, Miguel Sosa, a composer, concert pianist, conductor and teacher was asked by Taizo Oba, organizer of the Bond Made of 1,000 Tones project, to write an original composition for one of the two "tsunami-debris" violins.
Sosa's first thought was "Me? Really? I never saw myself as someone who would be doing a contribution like this." Oba, though, couldn't have made a better choice.
After the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, master luthier Muneyuki Nakazawa was moved to collect pieces of maple and pine from driftwood and debris in the tsunami-ravaged city of Rikuzentakata and other places along the devastated coast of Iwate Prefecture. Over the next year he crafted two violins, one of which has a painting on its back of the "Miracle pine" — the lone pine tree that withstood the waves that wiped out the rest of the grove of 70,000 pines that had lined the beach of Rikuzentakata.