Tōru Takemitsu

Tōru Takemitsu composed across various art-music genres and techniques, from the graphic scores of the Corona series (1962), to soundscape pieces, theater, ballet, and choral works. Alongside these, he remained devoted to his preferred genres: orchestral music, chamber music, and especially film music. His nearly one hundred film scores form a significant part of his catalog. Toward the end of his life, he also considered writing an opera based on the libretto Madrugada by Barry Gifford, but the project remained at the sketch stage.¹

The wide range of influences Takemitsu explored during the first decade of his career reveals just how open he was to a variety of compositional approaches. He attended concerts organized by the experimental music group Jikken Kōbō (the “Experimental Workshop”; see biography) and discovered, in 1952, Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps as well as, in 1954, Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. He also attended some of the first musique concrète and electronic music performances in Japan. Messiaen’s modal and pianistic approach is apparent in Uninterrupted Rest I. In the same period, Takemitsu composed some of his most radical pieces: Static Relief and Vocalism A· I for magnetic tape (later reused for the animated short film Love by Yôji Kuri, 1963). He wrote using Schoenberg-like dodecaphonic series for a short time, but abandoned serialism altogether in the mid-sixties.

After Takemitsu reached a first stage of maturity with his Requiem for Strings, he discovered John Cage, and correspondingly, a way of reintegrating his own Japanese musical culture into his work. Cage’s approach allowed him to come to terms with his own tradition while incorporating indeterminacy and graphic notation. Corona and Blue Aurora for Toshi Ichiyanagi (1964) are exemplars of this period. Musicologist Peter Burt underlines how Arc (1963, rev. 1976), a large-scale six-part composition for piano, orchestra, and electronics, amounts to an inventory of the techniques Takemitsu had mastered, including Messiaen-influenced modes, serialism, and chance writing and graphic notation from Cage.

Takemitsu achieved international acclaim with November Steps, his most emblematic work. Although his earlier compositions had attracted attention outside of Japan, November Steps made a lasting impression, bringing together two different cultural universes through the combination of Japanese and Western instruments — an approach unusual at the time, but soon to be followed by many other Japanese composers. The piece was contemporary with a trend in Western art music where composers sought to connect with audiences by evoking familiar traditions, as in Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Music for King Ubu's Dinner, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen. November Steps participates in this artistic dialogue, though not by staging a direct stylistic confrontation between past and present traditions, which is simply juxtaposition, nor by attempting their synthesis. The Japanese instruments — the shakuhachi and biwa — remain isolated, never superimposed on the orchestral passages, and thus stand apart from the spirit of the Western concerto. They point to a practice and a history that are fundamentally different, whether in terms of playing techniques or the presence of noise elements within the sound. Takemitsu emphasized the irreconcilable aspects of Western and Japanese traditions, not wishing “to resolve such fruitful antinomy but, on the contrary, to let the two entities struggle against each other.”²

Such ideas are reflected in the physical position of the performers on stage: by grouping them in two quasi-symmetrical orchestras, Takemitsu creates an interactive dialogue between the Japanese instruments and the orchestra (he does the same later in Autumn, 1970) and produces stereophonic effects that often prepare the entrances of the two soloists. Takemitsu had been interested in the use of space in music since the composition of Arc. He took these notions to a new level with November Steps and then pursued them further with Gémeaux (1971-1986) for oboe, trombone, two orchestras, and two conductors and In an Autumn Garden (1973-1979) for gagaku orchestra.³ November Steps is thus both the culminating work of a composer divided between two cultures, and the turning point in a body of work aimed to be increasingly accessible to Western audiences. The image of a mirror between East and West that Takemitsu described in his writings aptly illustrates the evolution of his work as a whole.

From the 1970s onward, Takemitsu’s music stabilized around harmonically lush orchestral works such as A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977), Dreamtime (1981), and Spirit Garden (1994). This recasting was accompanied by tonal connotations, at least in timbre, that came to permeate his works, notably Far calls, coming, far! (1980) for violin and orchestra. At the same time, he began taking on more influences from Claude Debussy, whom he had long admired. This affinity can be traced from his 1967 work Green (originally titled November Steps II), inspired by Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, to the 1992 piece for flute, viola, and harp, And then I knew ’twas wind. It is especially evident in Quotation of Dream (1991) for two pianos and orchestra, which incorporates numerous quotations from La Mer.

Additionally, Takemitsu used poetic or literary references, notably from James Joyce. He saw a connection between Finnegan’s dream and the image of the fruitful water, which appears in various forms in his cycle Waterscape, a work of some fifteen pieces (including, in addition to those already cited, Toward the Sea I, II, and III, as well as those identified by musicologist Takashi Funayama as the “Finnegans Wake Triptych”: Far calls, coming, far!, riverrun, and A Way a Lone for string quartet). Like “a musical river flowing toward the tonal sea,” riverrun (1984) for piano and orchestra develops, like many of Takemitsu’s other pieces, the idea of “a sea of tonalities.” With the ubiquitous SEA motive (derived from the three-note cell E-flat–E–A and the six-note cell E-flat–E–A–C-sharp–F–A-flat), the work seeks to establish a link between continents and cultures.⁴ In a postmodern context, Takemitsu’s position reintegrated consonances and rejected the harsher harmonies and more radical gestures that he had championed up until November Steps.

The theme of nature became increasingly important in his work, giving rise to cycles such as Rain, Garden, and Trees, whose poetic imagery is sometimes drawn from literature. The Rain Tree Sketch series, for example, alludes to the rain tree described by the poet Kenzaburō Ōe, a tree whose leaves fold up to make a rain reservoir, allowing the tree to distribute water long after the showers have ended. Takemitsu uses this tree as a metaphor for memory: Rain Tree Sketch II is dedicated to the memory of Messiaen. Similarly, the image of constellations, in works such as Eclipse, Cassiopeia, and Gémeaux, provide another thematic thread of a comparable spirit.

As for Takemitsu’s film scores, one should avoid categorizing them as marginal to his concert repertoire, for three reasons. First, many of his scores have a direct relationship to concert works. For example, the film piece Furyo shonen: Bad Boy inspired a concert piece for two guitars bearing the same title, and the music for the film Love, previously alluded to, integrates Vocalism A· I. Additionally, two years after composing for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1963 film Woman in the Dunes, he reused some of that material in his concert piece Dorian Horizon. He also adapted the film scores for Jose Torres, Black Rain, and The Face of Another for concert, grouped under the title Three Film Scores.

Second, his film music does not necessarily conform to standard commercial criteria or tonal conventions (although he did not shy away from more conventional ways of composing, as in his score for the 1970 film Dodes'ka-den directed by Akira Kurosawa). He uses traditional Japanese instruments in the 1962 documentary Japanese Insignia, two biwas in the score for Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962), and Balinese music and tape in Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, 1969); these elements put music to the forefront in film scoring. He integrates musique concrète and electronic music techniques in The Assassination (Shinoda, 1964) and Kwaidan (Kobayashi, 1965), and he uses prepared piano and harpsichord in Pitfall (Teshigahara, 1961). In essence, film provided him with an opportunity to demonstrate his remarkable versatility by writing in a wide range of styles, including imitating modern jazz in The Inheritance (Kobayashi, 1962) or responding to Kurosawa’s request for the style of Gustav Mahler in Ran (1985).

Thirdly, Takemitsu’s film music avoids redundancy between image and music — to the point that, in Ran, the music can even push the dialogue into the background. He also makes extensive use of delay between soundtrack and image, creating moments of unexpected disjunction.

Takemitsu has collaborated with some of the great names of Japanese cinema: sixteen films with Shinoda, ten with Teshigahara, again ten with Kobayashi, five with Nagisa Ōshima (including Empire of Passion), two with Kurosawa, and one with Shōhei Imamura (Black Rain), to name but a few. Japanese cinema also provided Takemitsu with an opportunity to explore a form of violence he embraced, as well as to address themes of claustrophobia developed by the writer and playwright Kōbō Abe, which would later inspire Teshigahara in his films.

The diversity of expression in Takemitsu’s work — which embraces many of the major trends in contemporary Western art music — draws its strength from the interplay between two traditions: the Western, which he integrated early on, and the Eastern, which he gradually reintroduced. The main points of reference for his approach can be found in November Steps and In an Autumn Garden. Revolving around these core pieces are his more adventurous (pre-1967) works and the more mainstream (post-1975) works. As his fame grew in the West, he was increasingly perceived as too Western by the younger generation of Japanese composers.

^{1. In 2005, Ichiro Nodaïra composed music for the libretto. ↩}

^{2. Tōru TAKEMITSU, “Le son aussi fort que le silence,” Salabert, 1980. ↩}

^{3. Takemitsu used a traditional instrument, the Japanese mouth organ, the shô, in an orchestral setting one last time in 1992 with Ceremonial, though to a very different effect. ↩}

^{4. Takashi FUNAYAMA, “Vers la mer des sonorités” (1998), in Cahiers de recherche sur Tōru Takemitsu, Tokyo. ↩}