- Date: 1984
- Composer: Toru Takemitsu
- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
Review
It may seem curious that a Japanese composer with only limited facility in literary English would find himself drawn to James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake. For Toru Takemitsu, however, the linguistic barrier between him and Joyce's infamously difficult work was not a wall but a window: the author meant for the book to come across as half-formed, tied together by those twisted tendrils of logic that only hold fast in dreams and that unravel by light of day. Freed from the native speaker's inevitable impulse and vain effort to make sense of the calculatedly intractable prose, Takemitsu could listen under less duress to the surface of the text, grasping at will for discernible images, carried along by the current of words.This adventurous undertaking was the inspiration for riverrun, one of a triptych of works composed in the mid-1980s as musical responses to Finnegan's Wake. In fact, the title, including the lowercase "R," is borrowed from the very first word of the novel. (The other two Joyce pieces, A Way a Lone, for string quartet, and Far Calls, Coming, Far!, for violin and orchestra, both take their titles from the book's final paragraph.) The work, which is scored for piano soloist and orchestra, also draws on two other prominent ideas from the book: water-related themes and "falling" imagery (rivers, after all, flow downward). If listeners adopt the composer's imagery, the river is a slow-moving one, with a gently undulating surface that is frequently rippled with eddies and, on occasion, shattered with splashes and brief rapids. Takemitsu's acute sense of instrumental color synthesizes the piano's gestures with seamless and complementary timbres from the orchestra. The soloist occasionally surfaces alone in extended cadenza-like passages, but then retreats just beneath the translucent orchestral surface. To imagine Takemitsu reading Joyce might provide a guide for how to might read -- or hear -- Takemitsu, not because his music is in some way intrinsically cast in a Japanese musical idiom (though certain decidedly Oriental ideas dominate his aesthetic approach to Occidental composition), but because, like Joyce's invented words and incongruous sentences, Takemitsu's gestures and textures resist being heard as musical syntax or symbols, and insist instead on being heard as veiled allusions and sheer, sonic bodies. ~ All Music Guide
Albums with Complete Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| A String Around Autumn | 2002 |
| Toru Takemitsu: Riverrun; Water-Ways, etc. | 1991 |
