While visiting Tokyo recently, saxophonist and composer John Zorn praised Michiyo Yagi, saying, "She's an example of a new kind of musician that can play all different styles of music in her own personal way."

Koto players are not often found in the company of saxophonists. Yagi, however, seemed entirely at home in Shinjuku's Pit Inn with Zorn and a loud, aggressive band that included drums, electric bass and guitar. During one particularly mad crescendo that seemed far too dense to accommodate any new sounds, Yagi paused a moment and then reached for what looked like a club.

Gripping this implement in both hands, Yagi scraped it across the strings of her koto, using short, sharp tears -- SCRAPE! . . . SCRAPE! . . . SCRAPE! In doing so, she revealed a space in the music that hadn't seemed to exist just a moment before. Filling this space with sound that was both frightening and beautiful, Yagi pushed an already incredible moment of music into being a magical moment.

Last weekend, over coffee and cake in her living room, Yagi spent nearly three hours discussing the history of the koto and her own development, occasionally illustrating a point on her instrument. And, of course, she answered a question about her timing with the club that night at the Pit Inn.

"Those are great musicians and they are the ones who left the space open for me," she explains. "Music is not just playing, it's listening as well. Musicians make space for one another."

Yagi may play and speak like the consummate improviser, but her musical consciousness was originally forged in the alarmingly rigid world of traditional Japanese music. Although she didn't begin seriously applying herself to the koto until her late teens, Yagi progressed unusually rapidly on the instrument. At the age of 22, her koto master suggested that she submit to the ultimate form of musical apprenticeship -- joining a small group of select students, she became an uchi deshi and moved into the home of her master. As an uchi deshi she studied music but also cooked, cleaned and laid out the master's kimono. She and the others performed rarely, and when they did, they were expected to pay the master for the honor of sharing the stage with him, as well as sell a quota of tickets to the event. The music they performed was either that of the master or traditional Japanese songs. The idea of writing -- let alone performing -- their own music was unthinkable.

In 1989, when she was 25 years old, Yagi's master, in conjunction with the school with which he was affiliated, sent her to Wesleyan University in the United States as a visiting professor of traditional Japanese music. In this role -- as in her apprenticeship -- she was not free to be herself but, rather, she was sent as an inferior replica of her master. But when she arrived at Wesleyan, she began to understand music in a way her master never intended.

"I couldn't believe how much new music there was," she says excitedly. "Students actually wrote their own compositions and these compositions were performed on a daily basis. And no one had to pay a master to play, no one had to sell their quota of tickets. This kind of freedom was completely alien to me."

After thriving for a year in this atmosphere, Yagi returned to her master in Japan to resume her apprenticeship but found settling back in difficult.

"I had new ideas about music and what my own music could be. But when I got back, I realized that I was the only one that had changed -- the master, the school were still the same and I didn't fit in anymore. Gradually, I started performing my own music, but the nail that sticks up gets pounded down."

Without sufficient room to grow, Yagi says she began to feel lonely and depressed. "I had all this inspiration but nothing had changed. I still respected my master, but I refused to forget what I had learned in the States and I had no regrets about breaking away from the old way."

For the past seven years or so, Yagi has been greatly in demand for her knowledge of traditional Japanese music combined with her desire to expand the range of music in which the koto can be featured. She works as a composer and arranger of film scores, tours overseas and plays regularly in Tokyo. In addition to being a major figure in improvisational music, she's also a member of Kokoo, a band known for playing rock tunes -- "Godzilla" and "Purple Haze" among them -- on traditional instruments. Along with the singer Haco and sample artist Sachiko M, she is also a member of the quirky, utterly enjoyable band Hoahio. In 2001 she released "Yural" with Paulownia Crush, a seven-woman koto ensemble that plays a range of beautiful, ethereal music. However, 1999's solo album "Shizuku" is perhaps Yagi's most personal and interesting demonstration of the koto's potential to transcend its role in classical music.