Toru Takemitsu

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(b Tokyo, 8 Oct 1930). Japanese composer. He was a pupil of Kiyose from 1948. Influenced by Webern, Debussy and Messiaen, he has reflected what is most oriental in these composers: a concern with timbre and elegant sound and with the precision of the moment rather than with pattern and development. His music often gives the impression of spatial experience and of materials evolving freely of their own accord; silence is fully organized. Some of his works use Japanese instruments, but most are for Western orchestral and chamber media. Among the best known are Requiem for strings (1957), November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi and orchestra (1967), A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977) and From me flows what you call Time (1990) for percussion quintet and orchestra.

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Widely considered modern Japan's greatest composer in the classical music tradition, Toru Takemitsu (1930 - 1996) merged Japanese and Western instruments and techniques in his music. Equally important, perhaps, was the way he humanized some of the intellectual devices used by contemporary classical composers of the West, not diluting their rigor but attaching them to concrete images rooted in nature and in Japanese aesthetics.

Growing up amid the destruction of World War II, Takemitsu learned to despise the culture of his native country. Almost completely self-taught as a composer, he immersed himself in Western techniques, returning to Japanese music only later, at the suggestion of an American associate. Takemitsu's music is sensuous and accessible, and he was an acclaimed and enthusiastic composer of film music, the classical genre most oriented toward mass appeal. The detail and density of his music also drew the admiration of specialists, including many of his fellow composers. Some of his music involved tonal depictions of Japanese gardens, and he often acknowledged the garden as a source of inspiration. "I can imagine a garden superimposed over the image of an orchestra," Takemitsu was quoted as saying on England's Soundintermedia website. "A garden is composed of various different elements and sophisticated details that converge to form a harmonious whole."

Drafted into Labor Gang

Born October 8, 1930, in Tokyo, Japan, Takemitsu spent his early life in China with his family. By the time he was brought back to Japan to attend school in 1938, Japanese militarism was on the rise and Western music and films were mostly forbidden. Takemitsu kept up a secret fascination with the West. After war broke out he saw a newsreel film of a British destroyer, the Prince of Wales, being sunk by a Japanese attack, but felt only awe at the sophistication of the British ship. In 1944, at 14, Takemitsu was drafted and put to work in a labor gang assigned to build a Japanese army camp. While he was working, an officer played a recording of the French popular song "Parlez-moi d'amour" (Speak to Me of Love, 1930). "I did not know there was such beautiful music in the world," Takemitsu later recalled, according to the Economist.

After the war Takemitsu tuned into the American Armed Forces Radio, hearing a broad mix of music, including popular songs, Western classical music, and jazz. In the last of these categories, it was bandleader and composer Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, with his range of instrumental effects, whom he especially admired. By the time he was 16, Takemitsu had decided he wanted to be a composer. He studied briefly with composer Yasuji Kiyose beginning in 1948, but mostly he learned musical composition on his own. "My teachers," he was quoted as saying by Soundintermedia, "are Duke Ellington and nature." He also admired the quiet, subtly colored impressionist music of French composer Claude Debussy.

In poor health due to lung ailments, Takemitsu turned for moral support to his girlfriend, Asaka, who later became his wife and the mother of his daughter Maki. "He had holes in his lungs" when the two first met, Asaka told Kevin Jackson of the London Independent, "and his father had died early, so his mother had to go out to work, but in spite of their financial difficulties he really wanted to study music. When I met him, he almost forced me into taking care of him; he needed to be taken care of."

Takemitsu quickly absorbed the latest developments in Western music, proceeding from Debussy to the contemporary French music of Olivier Messiaen. His first work to be publicly performed, the Lento in Two Movements, was influenced by Messiaen but had Takemitsu's own distinctive style, which would remain recognizable even as he adopted various new Western techniques. His music was often quiet, with small, sudden climaxes rather than a strong feeling of movement toward a goal, and with a strong focus on timbre (the "color" of a sound"), texture, and register (the highness or lowness of a pitch). There was something Japanese about Takemitsu's music, even during the years when he would have been reluctant to admit such a thing.

Wrote Electronic Piece

During the 1950s Takemitsu kept up with new Western styles, mastered them quickly, and gained wider recognition. He studied the serialist music of Austrian composers Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, which rejected the idea of key and instead derived the pitch material of a piece of music from a small cell or sequence of notes announced at the beginning of the work. Electronic music, made on a large computer apparatus prior to the invention of the synthesizer, was on the rise, and Takemitsu's 1956 piece Vocalism A.I., which manipulated recordings of actors speaking those vowel sounds, was one of Japan's first electronic compositions. Takemitsu's reputation grew when Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky, visiting Japan, heard Takemitsu's Requiem for strings (1957) and praised it.

In the early 1960s Takemitsu began to travel to the West for performances of his works. In Hawaii he met experimentalist composer John Cage, whose works often involved leaving portions of his compositions to chance in one way or another, and the two became friends. Takemitsu had already experimented with chance procedures in such works as Corona for one or more pianists, 1962, whose score resembled a diagram rather than conventional music notation. Cage, an adherent of Zen Buddhism, encouraged Takemitsu to reconnect with his Japanese roots, and Takemitsu began to think about the power of ritualistic Japanese art forms such as puppet theater. At the same time, he was becoming disillusioned with the hard-core intellectualism of serialist composers and more and more interested in nature as a source of inspiration. Takemitsu's Coral Island (1962) won recognition in the West.

His real breakthrough, however, was November Steps, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1967 and conducted in its premiere by Seiji Ozawa, a close friend of Takemitsu. One of Takemitsu's first works to use Japanese traditional instruments, it was a concerto for solo biwa (a scraped and plucked Japanese lute) and shakuhachi (a Japanese flute), with Western orchestra. Barry Conyngham and Roger Woodward wrote in the London Guardian that "the music has an almost overpowering focus, as if - in trying to make the two musics one, in striving to accommodate the two rich worlds - the composer draws himself and us into a strange new state." Other major orchestras performed and recorded the work, and by around 1970 Takemitsu was a well-known name in classical music circles, invited to compose music for ensembles and festivals around the world.

Takemitsu's fascination with gardens came to the fore in his music of the 1970s and 1980s, in such works as Garden Rain (1974) for brass ensemble. He likened the intended experience of hearing his music to walking through a garden; the scenery changes as the listener moves through time, but there is no clear starting or end point. One of Takemitsu's best-known works remains the orchestral A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977). The piece mixes Japanese and Western techniques at a deep level, with a vivid evocation of the title scene (a solo oboe represents the descending birds) concealing a densely mathematical exploitation of permutations of the number five, based on the use of a pentatonic (five-tone) scale, in the shifting orchestral fields representing the shape of the garden.

Takemitsu's Waterways for piano and orchestra (1975) was inspired by the garden at Spain's Alhambra fortress. At first he was unmoved. "Since music is for me not symmetrical, I did not like the regularity of the garden at all," he was quoted as saying by Paula Deitz in the New York Times. But then a woman walked through the garden, breaking the symmetry of the scene and disturbing the water on a pond. "Only then, the music came," Takemitsu said.

Composed Film Scores

Despite the cutting-edge qualities of his concert music, Takemitsu never lost his appreciation for the popular songs that had originally inspired him. He was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Western pop music. Takemitsu found a meeting place between pop and classical music in his 93 scores for Japanese films, which he wrote with enthusiasm over the last three decades of his life and which covered all genres from sophisticated art-house films to thrillers. Takemitsu's film career began with the 1964 art film Woman in the Dunes and included scores for such classics as director Akira Kurosawa's Ran, a film based on Shakespeare's King Lear. His film scores varied according to the nature of the project; the Woman in the Dunes score was a sparse, minimal affair that would not have sounded out of place on a program of his concert music, while other scores were overtly emotional in the Western fashion. Takemitsu viewed some 200 films a year, and one of his favorite activities on arriving in a new city during his world travels was to head for a movie theater, whether he spoke the local language or not. In 1993 he wrote the score for the American film Rising Sun. Takemitsu's film scores represent an under-investigated aspect of his total output.

Takemitsu's genial personality won him friends as well as admirers. In person he was more boisterous than his calm music might suggest. Pointing to a picture of a spiritual-looking Takemitsu on a printed concert program, his daughter Maki told Jackson that "he certainly wasn't like that. He loved to play the Beatles or jazz on the piano; he loved to dance around and play, he loved socializing and drinking with other people, especially writers and painters and younger musicians…. He was really a lot of fun." Takemitsu had many friends at the top levels of Japanese literature and arts, including novelist Kenzaburo Oe and poet Shuntaro Tanikawa. His sense of humor was legendary. In broken English, he once told an interviewer that he thought silence was the mother of music. Then he backed off and corrected himself, saying that perhaps it was only the grandmother.

One of Takemitsu's major compositions of the 1970s, In an Autumn Garden (1979), was written entirely for the traditional gagaku Japanese court musical ensemble, but in the last two decades of his life he more often wrote for Western instruments. His music was often gentle in spirit, and he continued to refine his instrumental textures in the direction of greater and greater distinctiveness and clarity. Takemitsu's music continued to be frequently performed in the 1990s. His Fantasma/Cantos (1991) was awarded the 1994 Grawemeyer Prize, one of the classical music world's most prestigious honors and one that carried a $150,000 stipend. Little of his music to that point had been for voices, and he set to work on an opera, with a libretto by California novelist Barry Gifford. He was suffering from cancer, however, and he died in Tokyo on February 20, 1996.

Books

Contemporary Musicians, vol. 6, Gale, 1991.

Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 2001.

Periodicals

Daily News (Los Angeles), May 8, 2002.

Economist, March 2, 1996.

Guardian (London, England), February 22, 1996; August 29, 1997.

Independent (London, England), October 1, 1998.

New York Times, February 21, 1996; March 3, 1996.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 21, 1996.

Times (London, England), February 22, 1996.

Online

"Who Was Toru Takemitsu?," http://www.soundintermedia.co.uk/treeline-online/biog.html (February 2, 2006).

• Period: Contemporary (1950- )
• Country: Japan
• Born: October 08, 1930 in Tokyo, Japan
• Died: February 20, 1996 in Tokyo, Japan
• Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Electronic/Computer Music, Film Music, Keyboard Music, Orchestral Music, Vocal Music

Biography

Toru Takemitsu (1931-1996) was a self-taught Japanese composer who combined elements of Eastern and Western music and philosophy to create a unique sound world. Some of his early influences were the sonorities of Debussy, and Messiaen's use of nature imagery and modal scales. There is a certain influence of Webern in Takemitsu's use of silence, and Cage in his compositional philosophy, but his overall style is uniquely his own. Takemitsu believed in music as a means of ordering or contextualizing everyday sound in order to make it meaningful or comprehensible. His philosophy of "sound as life" lay behind his incorporation of natural sounds, as well as his desire to juxtapose and reconcile opposing elements such as Orient and Occident, sound and silence, and tradition and innovation. From the beginning, Takemitsu wrote highly experimental music involving improvisation, graphic notation, unusual combinations of instruments and recorded sounds. The result is music of great beauty and originality. It is usually slowly paced and quiet, but also capable of great intensity. The variety, quantity and consistency of Takemitsu's output are remarkable considering that he never worked within any kind of conventional framework or genre. In addition to the several hundred independent works of music, he scored over ninety films and published twenty books.

Takemitsu had no important teachers, and his musical career really began with the formation of the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) to promote and perform mixed-media art works. It was Stravinsky's acclaim of the Requiem for strings in 1959 that launched Takemitsu's international career. The next few years produced a wide variety of works including Takemitsu's prolific film work, and numerous new music concerts and festivals that culminated in 1967 with a commission for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. By this time, Takemitsu had begun using traditional Japanese instruments in his music. November Steps is one of his most successful combinations of Eastern and Western music; Takemitsu's style was created from, and rooted in both. Takemitsu's international fame skyrocketed after this premiere, flooding him with commissions and honors that established him as one of the most influential Japanese composers of the century. ~ Steven Coburn, All Music Guide