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The Music of Toru Takemitsu
Toru Takemitsu (193096) was the best known Japanese composer of
hisgeneration, bringing aspects of Eastern and Western traditions
together, yet heremained something of an elusive figure. The
composers own commentariesabout his music, poetic and philosophical
in tone, have tended to deepen themystery and much writing on
Takemitsu to date has adopted a similar attitude,leaving many
questions about his compositional methods unanswered. This bookis
the first complete study of the composers work to appear in
English. It is alsothe first book in this language to offer an
in-depth analysis of his music.Takemitsus works are increasingly
popular with Western audiences and PeterBurt attempts for the first
time to shed light on the hitherto rather secretive worldof his
working methods, as well as place him in context as heir to the
rich traditionof Japanese composition in the twentieth century.
peter burt is Vice-Chairman of the Takemitsu Society in the
United Kingdomand editor of the Takemitsu Society Newsletter. He is
currently editing a specialcommemorative issue of Contemporary
Music Review devoted to Toru Takemitsu.
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Music in the Twentieth Century
general editor Arnold Whittall
This series offers a wide perspective on music and musical life
in thetwentieth century. Books included range from historical and
biographicalstudies concentrating particularly on the context and
circumstances inwhich composers were writing, to analytical and
critical studies concernedwith the nature of musical language and
questions of compositionalprocess. The importance given to context
will also be reflected in studiesdealing with, for example, the
patronage, publishing, and promotion ofnew music, and in accounts
of the musical life of particular countries.
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The Music of
Toru Takemitsu
Peter Burt
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So
Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge
University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521782203
Peter Burt 2001
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory
exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing
agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2001
Reprinted 2003
This digitally printed first paperback version 2006
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the
British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Burt, Peter, 1955
The music of T ru Takemitsu / Peter Burt.
p. cm. (Music in the twentieth century)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0 521 78220 1
1. Takemitsu, T ru Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II.
Series.
ML410.T134 B87 2001
780.92dc21 00-045505
ISBN-13 978-0-521-78220-3 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-78220-1 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-02695-6 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-02695-4 paperback
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for Sumine
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Contents
Acknowledgements page ix
Note on conventions xi
Introduction 1
1 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan 4
2 Music and pre-music: Takemitsus early years 21
3 Experimental workshop: the years of Jikken Kobo 39
4 The Requiem and its reception 50
5 Projections on to a Western mirror 73
6 Cage shock and after 92
7 Projections on to an Eastern mirror 110
8 Modernist apogee: the early 1970s 132
9 Descent into the pentagonal garden 160
10 Towards the sea of tonality: the works of the 1980s 175
11 Beyond the far calls: the final years 216
12 Swimming in the ocean that has no West or East 234
Notes 254
List of Takemitsus Works 269
Select bibliography 281
Index 288
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Acknowledgements
So many have helped me in some way or another over the course of
theseven years that I have been working on Takemitsus music that
there arebound to be some omissions in the list of names that
follow. In particularin Japan, where fabulous largesse seems to be
a cultural norm, I havereceived such generous assistance from so
many people that I am certain tohave forgotten to mention one or
two here, and I apologise in advance toanyone who feels they have
been left out.
Although wholly rewritten, this book has its origins in my
doctoralthesis, and in the first place thanks are therefore due to
my supervisor,Peter Manning, and other members of the music
department staff atDurham University who assisted me in various
ways in particular mybenefactor Michael Spitzer, who offered
magnanimous hospitality when-ever I needed to seek shelter in
Durham during my two years of exile inLondon. Thanks are also due
to Professor Manning for his assistance inprocuring me two valuable
scholarships from the Japan FoundationEndowment Committee, and the
Gen Foundation and of course to thestaff of those institutions
themselves for enabling me to make the two tripsto Japan without
which my knowledge of Takemitsu would have remainedvague and
incomplete indeed.
In Japan, my sincere appreciation is due to the former Principal
ofKunitachi College of Music, Dr Bin Ebisawa, as well as staff
membersCornelia Colyer and Hitoshi Matsushita, the librarian, for
providing mewith such a royal welcome during the disorientating
early days of my firstvisit. I would also particularly like to
thank the fellow researchers in mychosen field who have been so
generous in sharing with me the fruits oftheir knowledge: Yoko
Narazaki, Noriko Ohtake and above all MitsukoOno, a sort of walking
encyclopaedia on Takemitsu who has been ofinvaluable help in
correcting my many factual errors. Further gratitude isdue
especially to the flautist Hideyo Takakawa for introducing me to
histeacher Mr Hiroshi Koizumi, and to him in turn for first
introducing me tothe composers widow Mrs Asaka Takemitsu and
daughter Maki. I wouldalso like to thank the composer Mr Joji Yuasa
for granting me the time tointerview him about his early years with
Takemitsu in the Jikken Kobo, andFr. Joaquim Benitez of Elisabeth
University, Hiroshima, who kindly agreedto meet me in London and
look over my thesis three years ago. Takebumiix
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Itagaki, Kiyonori Sokabe, Masato Hojo and Yuji Numano have also
allbeen of invaluable assistance, and above all, perhaps, I must
express mydeepest gratitude to Ms Sumine Hayashibara and her mother
Kiku on theone hand, and Ms Emiko Kitazawa and her mother Etsuko on
the other,without whose offers of hospitality on, respectively, my
first and secondvisits to Japan I would have been unable to come
here at all.
I must also mention here my friend Junko Kobayashi, Chairman of
theTakemitsu Society in London, who has been so helpful in checking
overJapanese proper nouns with me; as well as Sally Groves of
Schotts and herTokyo counterpart, Nanako Ikefuji, for lending me
scores of Takemitsusmusic. And finally, I must thank the music
books Editor of CambridgeUniversity Press, Penny Souster, for
having sufficient faith in the potentialof my thesis to undertake a
book on Takemitsu. I hope what follows will insome small measure
repay the trust she has invested in me.
Tokyo, July 2000
The author gratefully acknowledges the permission of the
following pub-lishers to quote copyright materials in the music
examples:
Examples 31, 34 from Sacrifice and 436 from The Dorian Horizon
1967by Ongaku no Tomo Sha Corp.; used by permission
Examples 535 from Asterism (Edition Peters No. 6630064, 1969 by
C FPeters Corporation, New York), 56, 57 from November Steps
(Edition PetersNo. 66299, 1967 by C F Peters Corporation, New York)
and 5762, 64 fromGreen (Edition Peters No. 66300, 1969 by C F
Peters Corporation, NewYork) reproduced by kind permission of
Peters Edition Limited, London
Examples 47 (Webern), 83(v), 105(i) and 118(ii) copyright
UniversalEdition AG (Wien); reproduced by permission of Alfred A.
Kalmus Ltd
Examples 911, 13, 18, 19, 217, 379, 47 (Takemitsu), 48, 502,
657, 69,70, 724, 7680, 81(i), 83(iv), 84(i), 85(i), 86(i), 89, 90,
91(iiii), 120(i),129, 134 reproduced by permission of Editions
Salabert, Paris/UnitedMusic Publishers Ltd
Examples 82(iii), 83(ii) reproduced by permission of Editions
AlphonseLeduc, Paris/United Music Publishers Ltd
Examples 82(iii), 83(i, iii), 84(ii), 85(ii), 86(iiiii)
reproduced by permis-sion of Editions Durand S.A. Paris/United
Music Publishers Ltd
Examples 13, 5, 6, 16, 17, 402, 81(iiiii), 87, 91(ivxii), 929,
101,105(ii), 10612, 11415, 117, 118(i), 119, 120(iiv), 1223, 1256,
128,1303 reproduced by permission of Schott & Co., Ltd
x Acknowledgements
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Note on conventions
Throughout this book, Japanese personal names are rendered
accordingto the Western rather than Japanese convention, in which
the familyname follows the given name (Toru Takemitsu, not
Takemitsu Toru).Transliteration of Japanese words follows the
Hepburn system, and in theinterests of consistency albeit at the
risk of appearing pretentious thishas been applied even to words
generally given in English without diacriti-cal marks (Tokyo,
Osaka, etc.).
xi
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Introduction
The title of this book is The Music of Toru Takemitsu, and
despite themany other fascinating issues, biographical and
artistic, that it is temptingto explore in an examination of this
many-faceted genius composer, fes-tival organiser, writer on
aesthetics, author of detective novels, celebritychef on Japanese
TV it is with Takemitsus legacy as a composer that thefollowing
chapters are predominantly concerned. In fact, the books scopeis
even narrower still, for although Takemitsu, as the worklist at the
end ofthis volume will show, produced a vast amount of music for
film, theatre,television and radio as well as a number of other
pieces of more populistcharacter, such works lie beyond the remit
of the present study, which forthe most part deals only with the
composers classical scores for theconcert platform. Right from the
start, however, it should be emphasisedthat such an approach
focuses on only a small area of Takemitsus versatilecreativity, and
it should always be borne in mind that these other areas ofactivity
were an ever-present backdrop to his mainstream work, interact-ing
fruitfully with the latter in ways which it has been possible to
hint at inthe following pages, but regretfully not examine in more
detail.
The bulk of this work, then chapters 2 to 11 is concerned
withdescriptions of Takemitsus music for the concert room,
examining theprincipal scores in roughly chronological sequence,
and including a certainamount of biographical information to set
them in context. Though thissection is continuous, the reader will
probably soon realise that thearrangement of these chapters
reflects an implicit, provisional division ofthe composers career
into three periods, dealt with respectively in chap-ters 24, 58 and
911 of the book. Although rather schematic and cer-tainly no
watertight compartmentalisation, this periodisation isnevertheless
one which, in its broad outlines at least, would appear to
findsupport amongst other writers on the subject. Certainly the
suggested tran-sition from second to third period represented, as
we shall see, a changeof style so dramatic that it has been hard
for commentators to miss it: YokoNarazaki, for instance, who
divides the composers music into two periods,speaks of a change
from an avant-gardeto a conservativestyle1 aroundthe end of the
1970s; Jun-ichi Konuma, more robustly, of a substitution
oferoticism for stoicism in the composers Quatrain of 1975.2
On this basis, it is true, it might be argued that a bipartite
scheme,1
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hinging on the incontrovertible fact of this obvious stylistic
conversion,constitutes an adequate working description of the
composers develop-ment, and that further sub-division would be
hair-splitting andsuperfluous. Nevertheless, I feel that there is a
second, if less spectacular,distinction to be made between the
juvenilia from the first decade ofTakemitsus composing career (from
1950 onwards), and the works whichsucceeded them from around the
turn of the 1960s. The journeymanworks from the period prior to
this point are of interest insomuch as theyreflect, in their purest
form, the stylistic imprints of those American andEuropean
composers by whom Takemitsu was initially most profoundlyinfluenced
in his rather isolated situation in post-war Japan. By contrast,the
works from around 1960 onwards reveal a very rapid assimilation of
allthe preoccupations Takemitsu became aware of as his knowledge of
thedomestic and international music scene enlarged dramatically not
onlythose of the modernist avant-garde, but also, and most
importantly, ofJohn Cage and, through his influence, of traditional
Japanese music. Thechange wrought upon the musical language of the
first period by thesepowerful outside influences has not escaped
the attention of other writerson the subject: Yukiko Sawabe, for
instance, certainly agrees on theappearance of at least two new
elements in Takemitsus music around1960, traditional Japanese
instruments and the discovery of nature inmusic, a discovery in
which the composer was encouraged by his encoun-ter with John
Cage.3 Broadly speaking, too, the rather simplistic-soundingpicture
of the composers career as a beginningmiddleend triptych
thatemerges from the addition of this second transitional point is
not withoutsupport from other commentators. Although he locates the
two turningpoints in 1957 and 1973/4, for instance, Kenjiro
Miyamotos tripartitescheme is in other respects more or less
identical with my own;4 while bothTakashi Funayama5 and Miyuki
Shiraishi,6 speak, less specifically, of early,middle and late
periods in the composers work.
The approach adopted towards Takemitsus music in the course of
thesecentral chapters is, the reader will soon realise, primarily
an analytical one.This to a certain extent reflects the perceptual
biases and academic trainingof the author, and in particular the
origins of this book in my own doctoralthesis, rather than any
intrinsic advantages such a method might havewhen applied to
Takemitsus music. In fact, the latter is emphatically notcarefully
put together for the benefit of future academics to take
apartagain, and analytic approaches towards it therefore have a
tendency to takethe researcher up what eventually proves to be a
blind alley. Takemitsusown writing about music, significantly,
rarely gives away any technicalinformation about his musical
construction or contains music-type exam-
2 Introduction
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ples, concerning itself instead with abstract philosophical
problemsexpressed in a flowery and poetic language, and many
commentators particularly in Japan have followed his example in
dealing with the musicon this level, rather than venturing into the
murkier waters of his actualcompositional method. One has the
feeling, therefore, that one is goingagainst the grain of the
composers own preferred concept of appropriatedescriptive language
by attempting to submit his music to dissection withthe precision
tools of Western analysis, and is perhaps justly rewarded witha
certain ultimate impenetrability.
Nevertheless, as I have explained elsewhere,7 I do not believe
that oneshould for this reason be deterred from making the effort
to understandTakemitsus music on a more technical level. Such an
enterprise, I wouldsuggest, is well worth undertaking, for two
reasons in particular. First,despite its shortcomings, it is able
to uncover a good deal of the still rathersecretive goings-on
behind the surface of Takemitsus music, as the follow-ing pages
will reveal. And secondly, by its very impotence to explain
thewhole of Takemitsus creative thinking, it illustrates the extent
to which theconstruction of his music is governed by decisions of a
more irrationalnature, which even the most inventive of scholars is
powerless to accountfor. Mapping out the area which is tractable to
analysis, in other words, atthe same time gives the measure of that
vaster territory which is not.
Why this should be so, why Takemitsus music should ultimately
resistanalytical explanation, is a question to which I attempt to
give someanswers in my twelfth and final chapter, which steps
outside the bounds ofthe remit I claimed for this book at the
beginning of this introduction toexamine some of the more abstract
and philosophical issues surroundinghis work: offering an
assessment of his status as a composer, an examina-tion of some of
his aesthetic views (to the extent that I understand them),and an
evaluation of some of the more frequent criticisms to which he
hasbeen subject. The other place where my subject matter
transgressesbeyond the bounds of my own self-imposed limitations is
at the verybeginning of the book. To understand fully the nature of
Takemitsusachievement, it is necessary to see him not only in
relation to the interna-tional Western music scene, but also in
relation to the aesthetic preoccupa-tions of the composers who
preceded him in the decades since Westernmusic was first introduced
to Japan. As, however, this is a history for themost part almost
entirely unfamiliar to Westerners, it has been consideredimperative
to give a brief overview of the subject in the opening chapter.
Itis with this pre-history, then the story of the arrival of
Western music inJapan and the development of Japanese composition
that succeeded it that The Music of Toru Takemitsu begins.
3 Introduction
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1 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
Popular culture has ensured that at least one or two key
elements in thestory of Japans unique and often turbulent
relationship with the Westernworld have become familiar to a wider
audience. Stephen Sondheims 1975musical Pacific Overtures, for
instance, charts the course of events subse-quent to that momentous
day in the nineteenth century when Japan wasfinally rudely awakened
from its quarter-millennium of feudal stability bya dramatic
intervention of modernity. The day in question was 8 July 1853,when
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry of the United States Navysailed
into Uraga harbour with his powerfully armed ironclad
steamboats,the kurofune (black ships); and to understand the
boldness and historicalsignificance of Perrys adventure, one has to
travel back in time a quarter ofa millennium further still, to
1603. For it was in that year that IeyasuTokugawa finally acceded
to an office familiar to Westerners, once again,from populist
sources, in this case James Clavells 1975 novel and its subse-quent
film and television versions: the title of military dictator of all
Japan,or Shogun.
Having attained this sovereign position at great cost by finally
subjugat-ing the powerful regional warlords (daimyo), the Tokugawa
family wasunderstandably anxious to preserve the fragile
centralised power it hadestablished. In particular, wary of the
colonial ambitions of the foreignnationals then resident in Japan
and of any alliance between these andtheir daimyo subordinates they
embarked on a campaign of draconianmeasures to protect their
country from the perceived alien menace.Japanese Christians were
martyred, foreign nationals repatriated, and theJapanese themselves
forbidden to travel abroad, until by 1641 no contactwith the
outside world remained except for a small community of Dutchtraders
confined to their island ghetto of Deshima in Nagasaki
harbour.Japan, allowing its subjects no egress and outsiders no
ingress, had suc-ceeded within a few decades in turning itself into
a self-contained hermitkingdom, and henceforth would enforce the
most stringent measures toensure that right up to the arrival of
Perrys ships over two hundred yearslater this exclusion policy
would remain virtually inviolate.
Virtually inviolate, but not entirely so; despite the dire
penalties riskedby those who sought to transgress against the
exclusion order, from the4
-
eighteenth century onwards various seafarers Russian,
American,British, French and Dutch all made efforts to persuade the
Japanese toreopen their country to foreign commerce. Furthermore,
while theJapanese could not travel to the outside world, or make
contact with itsinhabitants, the educated classes, at least, could
read about what was hap-pening there at first secretly, as various
items of information were smug-gled in through approved Dutch and
Chinese traders, and then moreopenly, after the Shogun Yoshimune
(171645) rescinded the ban on theimportation of foreign books
(provided they contained no reference toChristian teaching) in
1720. As a result of this new development, thereeventually came
into existence the group known as the rangakusha orDutch Scholars,
whose painstaking efforts to translate works written inthat
language, starting from scratch, finally bore fruit when the
firstEuropean work to be published in Japan, an anatomy textbook,
appearedin 1774. Significantly, besides medicine, the other area of
Western exper-tise about which the Japanese were especially curious
was military science and with good reason. In the following century
Takashima Shuhan(17981866), who had learned about Western ordnance
from textbooks,was to warn the governor of Nagasaki after the
British success in theAnglo-Chinese war that Japan was no more
capable of resistance thanChina, and that the latters defensive
measures had been like childs play.1
In the eyes of modernisers such as Shuhan, Japans need to
acquire masteryof this particular branch of Western learning was no
longer simply amatter of scholarly curiosity, but of his countrys
very survival as an inde-pendent nation in the face of the
predatory desires of an industrialisedWest.
This gradual dissemination of Western ideas was one of a number
offactors by means of which the formerly impregnable edifice of the
exclu-sionist administration was brought increasingly under attack
over thecourse of the years. Other weapons in the armoury of the
reformingZeitgeist included the revitalisation of traditional
shinto beliefs and thebeginnings of research into national history
both of which developmentstended to call into question the
legitimacy of the Shoguns primacy overthe Emperor, who had been
reduced to the role of a mere puppet since theTokugawa ascendancy.
But the force which was to act as perhaps the mosteloquent advocate
for the abandonment of isolationism was operating ona rather more
mundane level than any of the above: that of everyday eco-nomic
transactions. The period of the Tokugawa Shogunate saw the
emer-gence of a mercantile class in the cities, and of coin rather
than rice as thefavoured medium of exchange through which they
conducted their busi-ness. The ruling military lite (samurai) of
Japans traditional feudal hier-
5 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
archy contracted huge debts to this newly emergent bourgeoisie,
whichthey then attempted to displace on to their already
overstretched peasantsubjects. As a result, the agricultural
economy started to crumble, to bereplaced by a mercantile economy
which Japan was unable to supportwithout calling on the outside
world.2 Even without the additional per-suasive capacities of
Commodore Perrys superior firepower, therefore,capitulation to the
American demand for trading opportunities, when atlast it came, was
by then a matter of stark economic necessity.
After the gunboats, the diplomacy: as follow-up to his first
audaciousviolation of the exclusion order in 1853, Perry returned
with an aug-mented force in February of the following year, and on
this occasion madethe long-awaited breakthrough. An agreement
concluded on 31 Marchallowed him the use of the twin ports of
Shimoda and Hakodate forlimited trade, and provided for consular
representation for his country.This success of Perrys soon prompted
others to follow his example:similar treaties were signed with the
British in October of the same year,and with the Russians and Dutch
in February and November of the follow-ing year respectively.
Thereafter events moved inexorably to bring aboutthe eventual
downfall of the ancien rgime, although the force that wasfinally
responsible for toppling the ruling military dictatorship, or
bakufu,perhaps came from a somewhat unexpected quarter. For
ultimately it wasforces loyal to the Emperor which brought about
the resignation of the lastShogun in 1867 and, after a brief civil
war, the formation of a provisionalgovernment and restoration of
the Emperor to what was considered hisrightful place at the head of
the political structure (the so-called MeijiRestoration). There
thus arose the somewhat paradoxical situation thatthe foundations
of what eventually proved to be the first Western-stylegovernment
in Japan were prepared by precisely those forces in societywhich
had initially viewed the bakufus accommodation with foreigners asa
betrayal, and whose battle-cry had once been Sonno joi! Revere
theEmperor and expel the barbarians!
The conflicting ideologies which rendered this situation so
paradoxical the modernisingspirit of the new administration, in
opposition to a some-times aggressive nostalgia for traditional
Japanese certainties on the part ofthose who had helped bring it to
power afford one of the first glimpses of aclash of values that has
had a central role in determining Japans subsequentcultural
development right up to the present day. The historian
ArnoldToynbee (18891975), who took an especial interest in this
aspect of Japanscultural history, once coined a handy pair of
expressions to describe thesekinds of opposing responses that may
be evoked in a society which has beenthrown on the defensive by the
impact of an alien force in superior
6 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
strength.3 The attitude of the progressives and modernisers, on
the onehand, he characterised as the Herodian4 position; that of
the man whoacts on the principle that the most effective way to
guard against the dangerof the unknown is to master its secret,
and, when he finds himself in the pre-dicament of being confronted
by a more highly skilled and better armedopponent . . . responds by
discarding his traditional art of war and learningto fight his
enemy with the enemys own tactics and own weapons.5 On theother
hand, in opposition to this receptive, mimetic attitude,
Toynbeeposited the idea of Zealotism: the stance taken by the man
who takesrefuge from the unknown in the familiar, and when he joins
battle with astranger who practises superior tactics and enjoys
formidable new-fangledweapons . . . responds by practising his own
traditional art of war withabnormally scrupulous exactitude.6
For Toynbee, the course of action ultimately chosen by the
nineteenth-century Japanese in response to their dramatic exposure
to Western tech-nological prowess constituted the Herodian reaction
par excellence : forhim, the Japanese were of all the non-Western
peoples that the modernWest has challenged . . . perhaps the least
unsuccessful exponents ofHerodianism in the world so far.7 Though
at first sight this mightappear to be a sweepingly imperious, etic
pronouncement on the situa-tion, it is nevertheless one that would
appear to be given a certain emicvalidation when one considers
certain reactions on the part of the Japanesethemselves such as the
remarks of Takashima Shuhan quoted a few para-graphs previously, or
the craze for wholesale Europeanisation that fol-lowed in the wake
of the Meiji restoration, when the desire of the Japaneseruling
classes to remodel themselves on the lines of their newly
foundtrading partners went far beyond the minimum necessary to
acquire anadequate military competence. But side by side with such
sycophantic imi-tation by a small lite there co-existed amongst the
population at largeother, drastically less welcoming responses to
the Western intrusion ofsuch a nature to suggest that, as one
leading authority on Japanese cultureexpressed it, Western culture
was accepted as a necessity but its donorswere disliked.8 And at
this point one becomes aware that the image con-jured by Toynbee,
of a wholehearted subjugation to the Herodian ideal,might require a
certain qualification, to say the least. In fact, the truth ofthe
matter would appear to be rather that the atavistic reaction
describedby Toynbee as Zealotism on no account perished with Perry,
and hasindeed never really gone away since. To an extent it can be
highlyprofitable, indeed, to regard much of the subsequent cultural
history ofJapan as ideologically motivated by the dialectical
opposition between thetwin forces of progressive cosmopolitanism
and regressive nationalism: an
7 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
oscillation, as the Takemitsu scholar Alain Poirier expresses
it, betweenexpressions of a nationalism, betraying itself sometimes
in the form ofviolent protectionism, and of a willingness to be
open towards theOccident.9
This oscillation described by Poirier, however, constitutes only
onemode of expression what might be called the diachronic of the
under-lying opposition, betraying itself above all in the form of
horizontal, his-torical fluctuations of power between two polar
positions, of which themost dramatic in recent times have probably
been the disastrous resur-gence of political nationalism before and
during the Second World War,and the extreme receptivity towards
Americanisation in the Occupationyears that succeeded it. But at
the same time this fundamental tension alsoexpresses itself
vertically, as it were synchronically, as a kind of basic
andongoing schism in the Japanese psyche, what has been described
as a kindof double structure or perhaps parallelism of lifestyle
and intellectual atti-tude of the modern Japanese.10 In this
compromise between modernimperatives and traditional instincts,
experience tends to be compart-mentalised, with Western behavioural
codes operating in certain areas for example, in most areas of
public, corporate life but with other, pre-dominantly private
domains reserved as sites wherein citizens tend con-sciously or
unconsciously to maintain the traditions passed on fromgeneration
to generation.11 In both of the above manifestations, this
inter-play of forces not necessarily a destructive one has played a
crucial rolein shaping both the historical development and everyday
orientation ofJapanese culture during the modern period. And as we
shall very shortlydiscover this has been as much the case with the
composition of Western-style music in Japan, as with any other form
of cultural activity.Horizontally, throughout the historical period
that has elapsed since thisEuropean art form was first transplanted
to Japanese soil, we shall observefluctuations between imitation of
the West and declarations of nationalis-tic independence;
vertically, taking a slice of time through any particularmoment in
that history, we shall observe time and again in the work
ofindividual composers the same preoccupation with establishing
their ownequilibrium between these recurrent, inimical forces the
centrifugalforce of adopting a Western idiom, the centripetal one
of defining, by con-trast, a uniquely Japanese identity. Indeed as
Miyamoto has correctlyobserved this opposition between an imported
foreign culture and theirown, and the manner of dealing with both,
was long conceived as thecentral problem facing Western-style
Japanese composers.12
The channels of transmission through which this Western music
firstcame to be re-established in Japan are essentially three in
number. First,
8 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
there was the reintroduction of Christian devotional music
silent sincethe early years of the seventeenth century, but
gradually being heard onceagain following the reopening of the
ports in the 1850s, and especially afterthe ban on Christianity was
abrogated in 1873. Secondly, there was theincorporation of musical
study into the school curricula, of which moremust be said shortly.
But the most assiduous cultivation of Western musicof all initially
occurred as a by-product of reform in that sphere in whichthe spur
towards modernisation was most keenly felt: the creation of amodern
fighting force. Military drill on the Western model
naturallyrequired Western-style martial music, and there thus came
into being firstof all the simple fife-and-drum bands known as
kotekikai, and then afterSeptember 1869, when the Satsuma clan were
loaned instruments andgiven instruction by the Irish-born
bandmaster John William Fenton(1828 ?) full-blown military bands on
the Western model. Fentonsband acquired its own instruments from
England in 1870 and later becamethe official band of the Japanese
navy, its directorship passing in 1879 tothe Prussian musician
Franz Eckert (18521916); while the army was toestablish its own
band in 1872, at first under the leadership of Kenzo Nishi,and then
subsequently and in interesting contrast to the naval band under
the direction of two French bandmasters: Gustave Charles Dagron,who
presided until 1884, and his successor Charles Edouard
GabrielLeroux (18501926).
The importance of these developments for the wider dissemination
ofWestern music resides in the fact that, besides their proper
function withinthe armed forces, these bands also performed roles
which demanded thatthey appear in a more public situation. One such
function was the provi-sion of ceremonial music for diplomatic
occasions, out of which expe-diency grew the creation of what still
remains Japans national anthem tothis day, Kimi ga yo possibly one
of the earliest examples of Western-style composition to involve at
least a partial Japanese input. But in addi-tion, and more
importantly still, the military bands played a vital role inthe
reception of Western music in Japan by giving public recitals of
it, tosuch an extent that until about 1879 . . . musical activity
was organisedaround the military band, and it was the band that
pioneered the way inwhat today we would call the public
concert.13
It was during the 1880s that, alongside these military band
concerts,public recitals also began to be given by Japans first
generation of musicschool students. As already suggested, the
institution of a public educationsystem on Western lines was the
third and, ultimately, probably the mostdecisive factor in the
promulgation of Western music in Japan. For, in theirearnest
efforts to imitate wholesale the pedagogic practices of the West,
the
9 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
Ministry of Education had stipulated in its regulations of 1872
that singingpractice should form part of the school curriculum at
elementary level,and instrumental tuition at middle-school level.
This was in spite of thefact that at the time the facilities for
putting such Utopian ideals into prac-tice were totally lacking an
act symptomatic of the progressiveness of theauthorities, who had
received the baptism of the new spirit of theReformation.14
Much of the responsibility for turning such ambitious schemes
intoreality was entrusted to an aristocratic Ministry official
called Shuji Izawa(18511917), who on the orders of the Ministry was
sent to the UnitedStates in 1875 to examine American pedagogic
methods, and to studymusic under the Director of the Boston Music
School, Luther WhitingMason (182896). In October 1879, shortly
after Izawas return to Japan, aMusic Study Committee (Ongaku
Torishirabe Gakari effectively a smallmusic college) was set up at
Izawas recommendation, and in the samemonth he set forth his ideals
for musical education in his Plan for theStudy of Music. If the
reception history of Western-style music in Meiji-era Japan has up
till now read rather like one of uncritical, if not necessar-ily
sympathetic, assimilation, then this document of Izawas supplies
uswith one of our first glimpses of a counter-tendency. But at the
same time,Izawa was clearly too much of a realist to lapse into
mere reaffirmation oftraditionalist certainties. Instead and
fascinatingly by describing threegeneral theories, he sets out his
argument for the future direction ofJapanese musical studies in
almost classical dialectic fashion. First comesthe thesis, to the
effect that since Western music has been brought toalmost the
highest peak of perfection as a result of several thousand yearsof
study since the time of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, it would
bebetter to cultivate such music exclusively and abandon the
inadequateEastern music entirely. Next comes an antithetical
proposition: sinceevery country has its own proper culture, it
would be absurd to try toimport a foreign music, and therefore the
best policy would be to bestowthe utmost care on the cultivation of
ones own musical heritage. So far, itis easy to discern in these
two opposing arguments fairly conventionalstatements of classic
Herodian and Zealotist positions respectively. Butit is at this
point that Izawa adds something new, something that we haveso far
not directly encountered at any point in our discussion of this
topic.As a third possible option and it is clearly the one which
Izawa himselffavours he suggests a synthesis of the above
antithetic alternatives: thepossibility of taking a middle course
between the two views, and by blend-ing Eastern and Western music
establish[ing] a new kind of music which issuitable for the Japan
of today.15 And it is here that one catches sight, for
10 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
the first time, of a yearning that was to prove something of an
ide fixe forso many Japanese musicians throughout the hundred-plus
years that havesubsequently elapsed: the desire for a resolution,
on a musical level at least,of that double structure in the
Japanese psyche already referred to, thequest for some sort of
synthesis of Japanese and European musics in ahigher unity.
In Izawas own case, however, the means he considered adequate
for therealisation of this ambitious project seem, with hindsight,
almost embar-rassingly nave. Shogaku Shoka-Shu, the collection of
primary-schoolsongs which embodied Izawas theories, and of which
the first set eventu-ally appeared in November 1881, was compiled
from three sources ofmaterial, each of which reflects one of the
three general principlesreferred to in the text of the Plan for the
Study of Music mentioned above.Thus the conservative, Zealotist
approach is reflected in the incorpora-tion of Works employing
materials from gagaku and popular song;16 aprogressive,
forward-looking attitude finds expression in the inclusion ofNewly
composed works; while the third, synthetic option is representedby
what are described as Famous Western tunes supplied with
Japaneselyrics. It is with the last of these in particular,
however, that the inade-quacy of Izawas rather amateurish approach
becomes especially apparent.Essentially this attempt at reconciling
the two cultures reflected his beliefthat it was only in their
advanced forms that Eastern and Western musicsdiverged, their basic
elements such as those found in childrens songs apparently being
strikingly similar. But the one enduring achievement ofthe manner
in which this philosophy was put into practice seems to havebeen to
sow in Japanese minds such confusing ideas prevalent to this day
as, for example, that Auld Lang Syne is actually a traditional
Japanesefolksong called Hotaru no Hikari. Moreover, while it had
been Izawas orig-inal intention that traditional Japanese and
Western music should bestudied alongside one another, as the years
passed the former option wasgradually abandoned, to be revived
again only after the Second World War.Thus his idealistic vision of
an accommodation between Eastern andWestern traditions began to
fade, and Japanese musical education began todevote its energies,
for the most part, towards an unequivocal pursuit ofexcellence in
the European tradition.
Most of these energies were, of course, directed towards the
acquisitionof performance skills, but it was nevertheless a
comparatively short timebefore the first efforts at Western-style
composition by academicallytrained Japanese musicians began to
manifest themselves. Unusually given the course of subsequent
history the credit for producing the firstinstrumental work of this
kind goes to a woman composer, Nobu[ko]
11 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
Koda (18701946), whose Violin Sonata appeared in 1897;17 while
in thesphere of serious vocal music, the title of pioneer is
conventionallyaccorded to Rentaro Taki (18791903), many of whose
songs, such as Kojono Tsuki or Hana, are still well known to most
Japanese today, and, despitethe obvious diatonicism of their
material, often mistakenly thought of astraditional in origin.
Additionally, in his final years before his prematuredeath from
tuberculosis, Taki contributed some of the earliest specimensof
solo piano music to the Japanese repertory a Menuetto in B minor
in1900, and the interesting Urami (Regret) of 1903.
Takis brief career also included a period of foreign study at
the LeipzigConservatoire: a form of finishing which was obviously
considered highlydesirable for any musician wishing to be taken
seriously at this period,when all but one of the teachers at the
Tokyo Music School (which theMusic Study Committee had become in
1887) were of German extrac-tion, and Japanese musicians tended to
think of the German traditions asthe only ones.18 Thus we find
Takis example emulated a few years later bythe colourful figure
whom Japan still reveres as the first great patriarch inits canon
of domestic composers, Kosaku Yamada (18861965). Aftergraduating as
a singer from the Tokyo Music School in 1908, Yamadamoved to Berlin
to study for four years at the Hochschule with Max Bruchand Karl
Leopold Wolf, where in 1912 he produced Japans first ever
home-grown symphony, Kachidoki to Heiwa (Victory and Peace),
followed in1913 by a late Romantic-style tone poem, Mandara no Hana
(Flower ofthe Mandala). It was in order to perform such ambitious
works as thesethat in 1915, after his return to Japan, he organised
the first Japanese sym-phony orchestra; a second orchestra which he
founded in 1924 after thefinancial collapse of the former was
eventually to develop into thepresent-day orchestra of the NHK.19
Yamada was also closely involved withthe struggle to establish
opera in Japan, forming his own troupe, the NihonGakugeki Kyokai
(Japanese Music Drama Association), in 1920; and inaddition to such
activities, he somehow found time to produce an esti-mated 1,500 or
so instrumental, vocal and operatic scores, throughoutwhich the
influence of his Germanic training is evident perhaps, indeed,is
reflected in the very fact of his choosing to bequeath the world
such amonumental legacy. Yet even here, in the case of this most
thoroughlyOccidentally trained of early Japanese composers, one
catches sight inlater years of a counteracting assertion of
national difference. It surfaces,for instance, in the composers
search for a manner in which a style of vocalmusic conceived to
suit the contours of German speech might be adaptedto reflect
adequately the very different intonational patterns of Japanese a
quest which oddly parallels the efforts of European composers such
as
12 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
Bartk, for instance, to rid their vocal music of the
inappropriate accentsof the Austro-German hegemony. And it also
emerges clearly, of course, inthe picturesque titles bestowed on
the instrumental pieces, or the texts andsubject matter chosen for
his songs and operas for example, in his mostsuccessful work,
Kurofune (Black Ships, 1940), which is loosely based onthe famous
relationship between the Japanese girl Okichi-san and theAmerican
Consul, and which Eta Harich-Schneider has neatly described asa
Puccini opera from the Eastern standpoint.20
The example of Taki and Yamada established the foundations of a
recog-nisable school of German-style composition in Japan, and in
the foot-steps of these two pioneers there followed a whole
generation ofGermanic composers, with a particular interest in
vocal music: RyutaroHirota (18921952), Shinpei Nakahama (18871952),
Nagayo Motoori(18851945) and Kiyoshi Nobutoki (18871965). One notes
in themanner in which this particular style was propagated a very
Japanese formof cultivation: an initial mimesis of another culture
is then faithfullyreproduced as composers working in the same style
form themselves intogroups, or as their method is transmitted by
the conservative, Confucianmethod from revered teacher to reverent
pupil. A similar pattern emerged,for example, a generation later,
after Saburo Moroi (190377) returnedfrom his period of study in
Berlin (193436) with Leo Schrattenholz tofound what he described as
his analysis school of composers rigorouslytrained on the Germanic
model: Yoshiro Irino (192180), Minao Shibata(191696), and his own
son Makoto Moroi (1930).
However, the one exception to the German monopoly on instruction
atthe Tokyo Music School the French conductor Nol Pri points to
theearly establishment of a tentative alternative to the Germanic
model: onethat subsequently would exert considerable appeal for
Japanese compos-ers, precisely because so many fin-de-sicle French
artists had themselvesbeen turning their sights towards the East in
the hope of discovering analternative to the oppressive weight of
their own cultural history. Onethinks here, for example, of Van
Goghs reinterpretations of Hiroshigewoodcuts, or (most pertinently
for our present purposes) of Debussysepiphanic exposure to Asiatic
music at the 1889 Paris Exposition and hischoice of a Hokusai
engraving to embellish the score of La Mer. It was notlong,
therefore, before some Japanese composers turned to this
alternativetradition to further their studies the pioneer being
Tomojiro Ikenouchi(190691), the first Japanese to enter the Paris
Conservatoire, where hestudied composition under Paul Henri Bsser
(18731972) from 1927 to1936. Ikenouchis pupils were to include
several distinguished figures inJapanese music, such as Saburo
Takata (1913), Akio Yashiro (192976),
13 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
Toshiro Mayuzumi (192997) and Akira Miyoshi (1933); while
theshadow of French influence was also to fall heavily upon such
composersas Meiro Sugawara (18971988) and Kunihiko Hashimoto
(190448).
Of course, the fascination exerted on these composers by
impressionis-tic music in particular was in no small measure due to
the fact that, pre-cisely for the reasons outlined at the beginning
of the previous paragraph,it reflected back at them, from a
European perspective, many of the preoc-cupations of their own
indigenous musical culture. The modally based,non-functional
harmonic idiom was eminently adaptable for use withthe scales of
traditional Japanese music, and both traditions shared a fond-ness
for timbral finesse and, on a broader level, for extra-musical
referenceto picturesque, naturalistic subject matter. All this was
hardly to be won-dered at, considering that the Japanese were
working with a Europeanreflection of deep structures to be found
within their own culture aprocess of that type which Takemitsu,
himself a devotee of Debussysmusic, was many years later to
describe as reciprocal action musicalart which was reimported to
Japan.21 Yet perhaps at this insecure stage ofJapanese musical
history, it was necessary that the Oriental in art beexported and
reimported in this way, in order that it might return homestamped
with the endorsement that would ensure its acceptance in
thepost-Meiji intellectual climate the seal of Western
legitimation.
Soon, however, a school of composition was to emerge in Japan
whichwould abolish such cultural customs officers entirely and work
directlywith the indigenous materials of its own heritage. In the
years leading upto the Second World War a new voice began to make
itself heard, onewhich eschewed the imitation of European models
favoured by more aca-demic composers and substituted for it the
expression of a distinctlynational identity. One cannot be sure to
what extent individual compos-ers associated with this movement
harboured nationalistic sentiments inthe broader, political sense
of the term, but it is certainly true that theascendancy of the
pre-war nationalist school in Japanese compositioncoincided with
the period in modern Japanese history when attitudestowards the
West had swung to the opposite extreme from the receptivitywhich
characterised the early Meiji era. Furthermore, this
isolationiststance was not without its impact on the composers of
the nationalistschool in at least one respect, inasmuch as few of
them underwent thecourse of foreign study in Europe deemed so
essential by many of theirpredecessors, and indeed one or two
notably Ifukube and Hayasaka were largely self-taught. Japanese
composers closely associated with thismovement include Akira
Ifukube (1914), Kishio Hirao (190753), ShiroFukai (190759), Fumio
Hayasaka (191455) (on whose film scores
14 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
Takemitsu would later work as an assistant), Shukichi
Mitsukuri(18951971), Yoritsune Matsudaira (1907), and the composer
usuallycited as Takemitsus only formal teacher, Yasuji Kiyose
(18991981) thelast three of whom formed the Shinko Sakkyokuka
Renmei (ProgressiveComposers League, later to become the Japanese
branch of the ISCM) in1930.
Strictly speaking, the descriptive term for this tendency here
translatedas nationalism minzokushugi also carries with it
connotations pertain-ing to the word for folk or race (minzoku),
and this provides a clue as tothe manner in which these composers
tended to operate, working (as oneJapanese commentator puts it)
with folk-music and folklore in the samemanner as the Hungarian
composer Bla Bartk.22 Thus Ifukube, forexample, produced
complicated polymetres and instrumental combina-tions learned from
years of listening to Ainu melodies in Hokkaido;23
while Mitsukuri though educated under Georg Schumann in Berlin,
andin many respects closer to the German Romantic tradition than
the othercomposers named above made a scientific study of the
elements of tradi-tional music, deriving from them a unique method
of harmonisationbased on the intervals of a fifth, which he
described as his oriental har-monic system (toyowaonteikei) and to
which he gave theoretical expres-sion in his publication Ongaku no
Toki (The Moment of Music) in 1948.
But while there are obvious similarities between such procedures
andthe methods of composers like Bartk in the West, there are also
importantdifferences. For example, in the case of Bartk the
folkloristic input tendsto be counterbalanced by features drawn
from the broader tradition ofEuropean art music, such as the rigour
of the constructional method or theavant-gardism of the chromatic
harmony. This is not generally the case inthe music of Japanese
nationalists, in which folk-derived materials tendto be stated
baldly, often in rather crude harmonisations, and developed asoften
as not by simple repetitive devices. Furthermore, whereas Bartk
andKodly did not limit their researches to their own country, but
recognisedinstead a deeper structural unity between various folk
musics transcend-ing national boundaries, the Japanese composers
preoccupied themselvesexclusively with traditional Japanese music,
conveniently ignoring what-ever features it shared with other
musics of the Far East. In addition, theJapanese regarded both
popular songs and highly sophisticated genres likegagaku
indiscriminately as expressions of the national; they did not
seethe fundamental binary opposition as consisting of a social one
betweenfolk and art music, and neither was the regional for example
the Ainumelodies with which Ifukube worked viewed as differing from
thenational, despite the distinct racial and cultural identity
possessed by
15 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
such minorities. Instead the fundamental duality perceived by
this genera-tion of composers was that between Japanese and
Western; between thenationalistic and the academic, pedagogical and
derivative. In all of theabove respects, then, the music of these
Japanese minzokushugi composersbears less resemblance to the work
of Bartk and Kodly than to that oftheir nineteenth-century European
forebears to artists from the periodwhen for the first time folk
art came to be regarded as a national, ratherthan a regional or
social, phenomenon.24 Indeed, as we have already seen,such an
identification is implicit in the very semantics of the term
conven-tionally used to describe them.
Music by minzokushugi composers nevertheless appears to have
enjoyeda considerable vogue in pre-war Japan, and even today
Japanese orchestrasvisiting the West have a habit of surprising
their audiences with bombasticencore pieces in the minzokushugi
vein, usually delivered with an appro-priately passionate,
kamikaze-like conviction. In general, however, outsideJapan music
of this sort is today little heard of, and the judgement ofmusical
history has not been especially generous towards those composerswho
have been unable to see greater possibilities in their native
idiomsthan merely the harmonisation of Japanese tunes.25 Such
judgementsreflect rather more than changing tastes in musical
fashion: they point tointrinsic weaknesses in the method of
procedure, as becomes readilyapparent to anyone who has heard the
works of certain of these compos-ers. Although it is unfair to
single out one particular work as emblematicof a whole artistic
tendency and although the time is long past whenmusic written for
the cinema was somehow considered intrinsically infe-rior it might
nevertheless serve to conjure for the modern reader someaural image
of this type of music by referring to the creation of AkiraIfukube
that has undoubtedly received the widest public exposure: hismusic
for Inoshiro Hondas (in)famous 1954 monster movie Gojira(Godzilla).
Most modern listeners would, I think, agree that the kinds
ofexcesses typified by such works do not constitute a very
imaginativeattempt at EastWest integration. The folk-like materials
tend to be pre-sented in crude harmonisations and orchestrated with
thick instrumentaldoublings, underpinned by a massive and
hyperactive percussion section devices which seem to have the
effect of battering out of them whatevervitality they might
originally have possessed. Ultimately, one comes to thesame
regretful conclusion as Robin Heifetz, when he notes that
generally,the results of these folklorists were not successful;26
but a discussion ofthe precise reasons for this failure must be
postponed for the moment,until the time comes to consider the very
different approach adopted bycomposers such as Takemitsu in the
concluding chapter of this book.
16 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
As already suggested, the years which saw the ascendancy of this
musicalnationalism were also those which witnessed the rise in
Japan of its polit-ical namesake which finally erupted to such
spectacularly destructiveeffect in World War II. The immediate
post-war years were harsh anddeprived in the extreme, affording
little opportunity for formal musicalstudy, but eventually and in
particular, from the 1950s onwards Japanese compositional activity
began to rise out of the ashes.Furthermore, much of the work
undertaken in those years can still becategorised in the same terms
used to describe the old pre-war schools ofcompositional thought.
Thus once again there emerged composers ofacademic bent who took
their cue from developments in Europe andoften travelled there to
study, and once again these may be divided intocomposers of French
or German inclination. To the former category, forinstance, belong
composers such as the Ikenouchi pupils Akio Yashiro andAkira
Miyoshi, both of whom studied in Paris (under Nadia Boulangerand
Raymond Gallois-Montbrun, respectively); while under the
latterheading one might subsume the three pupils of Saburo Moroi
alreadyreferred to: Yoshiro Irino, Makoto Moroi and Minao Shibata.
However,there was by now of course a great difference in the
European musicalscene from those days when Yamada went to
assimilate the methods ofGerman late Romanticism, or Ikenouchi
those of the French impression-ists, and these developments find
their echo in the more up-to-date preoc-cupations of post-war
composers. Irino, for instance, was the firstJapanese to compose a
twelve-note work, his Concerto da Camera for seveninstruments of
1951, while Shibatas activity in the 1950s ran the wholegamut of
post-war techniques and styles, experimenting with
twelve-notemethod, integral serialism, musique concrte, electronic
music and electricinstruments. In later years all of the composers
listed above were addition-ally to experiment with works employing
traditional Japanese instru-ments, often in combination with
Western resources: for example, IrinosWandlungen for grand
orchestra with two shakuhachis of 1973, andShibatas intriguingly
described Leap Days Vigil for kokyu, san-gen andelectro-acoustic
devices of 1972.
While it is hardly surprising that composers with an academic
outlookshould be turning their attention to the new developments in
post-warWestern music, what is less to be expected is that many
composers whocontinued to follow in the nationalist tradition what
Judith Ann Herdrefers to as the neonationalist movement should also
exploit the wealthof new sound resources now available to them,
rather than simply theJapanese tunes and pentatonic harmonies that
had satisfied their pre-warcounterparts. Amongst the many groupings
of Japanese composers that
17 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
sprang up in the 1950s, two in particular came to be associated
with thistendency. The first was the Yagi no Kai (Goat Group),
initially formed in1953 by Hikaru Hayashi (1931 ), Yuzo Toyama
(1931 ) and MichioMamiya (1929 ), to be joined five years later by
Toshiya Sukegawa (1930 ).The second was the Sannin no Kai or Group
of Three, founded (also in1953) by Yasushi Akutagawa (192589),
Ikuma Dan (1924 ) and the mostfamous of Ikenouchis pupils, Toshiro
Mayuzumi. Admittedly these com-posers varied in the degree to which
modernist devices were assimilatedinto the essentially nationalist
aesthetic. Members of the Yagi no Kai, forinstance, admired Bartks
example, and Mamiya used folksong materialmore or less directly in
his own work, whereas Hayashi tended to experi-ment with more
unusual forms of vocal technique, or used motifs fromtraditional
music as the starting point for more chromaticised,
quasi-serialprocedures (a similar method is to be found in the
post-war serial gagakucompositions of the older nationalist
composer Yoritsune Matsudaira).And at the opposite extreme from
Mamiya, perhaps the most technicallyradical of all these composers
was Mayuzumi, who was for a spell duringthe 1960s quite well-known
in the West as well as in Japan, partly as theresult of his score
for the John Huston film The Bible (1965). Mayuzumistudied under
Tony Aubin at the Paris Conservatoire from 1951 to 1952,where he
not only assimilated the techniques of Varse, Messiaen andBoulez
but also visited Pierre Schaeffers studio, completing soon after
hisreturn to Japan both the first ever specimen of musique concrte
to be com-posed in that country (Oeuvre pour Musique Concrte x, y,
z, 1953), and thefirst Japanese example of elektronische Musik
(Shusaku I, 1955). Within afew years of his return to Japan, too,
he was placing the wealth of new-found techniques he had mastered
at the service of his own pan-Asianvision. In particular, his
researches into timbre led him to study the over-tone structures of
Buddhist temple bells, thereby applying the mostadvanced techniques
of his day to a sound-material powerfully symbolic ofAsiatic
identity. It was as a result of these researches that he
producedprobably the most remarkable achievement of his early
career: inventing akind of spectral music decades before its
emergence in the work ofEuropeans such as Murail or Grisey, he used
the partials of a Buddhist bellas pitch-material for what is
perhaps one of the unsung eccentric master-pieces of post-war
music, his Nehan Kokyokyoku (Nirvana Symphony) of1958. Perhaps it
is therefore a little dispiriting to learn that the composer ofthis
impressive score was one for whom musical nationalism did, foronce,
most certainly go hand in glove with its political equivalent. Even
inthese early works, Mayuzumi seems a little too concerned with his
identityas a Japanese, and, as the years progressed, this concern
was to express itself
18 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
ever more in the form of active involvement with the political
right cul-minating in his work as Chairman of an organisation which
styled itselfthe Council for the National Defence of Japan (Nippon
o MamoruKokuminkaigi) between 1981 and 1991. In this respect,
Mayuzumi revealsa close spiritual kinship with another outspoken
critic of Japanese societywhom he had first met in Paris in 1952:
the famous novelist Yukio Mishima(192570). It was upon one of the
latters best-known short stories that hewas to base one of the most
substantial works of his later years: the operaKinkakuji (The
Temple of the Golden Pavilion), commissioned by theDeutsche Oper of
Berlin, and first performed there in 1976.
Yet alongside the academically trained composers working in
theirown interpretation of a translocated European tradition, and
the neona-tionalists asserting by contrast what they believed to be
their ownuniquely Japanese identity, there was possibly a third
force in operationin post-war Japanese music. Amongst the various
groupings that sprangup in the 1950s alongside such affiliations as
Yagi no Kai or Sannin no Kai,there was at least one whose
constitution was radically different. Its mem-bership comprised not
only composers but artists working in other media;furthermore, the
composers working within this group were autodidactswho had
received almost no formal education in music, and were thussomewhat
marginal to the official Japanese composing community. Thegroup in
question was called Jikken Kobo, the Experimental Workshop,and its
presence on the map of post-war Japanese music marks one of
thebeginnings of the emergence of a true avant-garde, of an
alternative toacademic tradition or nationalist rhetoric. Composers
associated withthis tendency wished rather to distance themselves
from the discreditedpre-war traditions, as they diligently tried to
rid themselves of thewartime stigma of existing nationalistic
models27 a task in which theywere assisted in the early post-war
years by the policy of the Occupationforces, who strictly limited
outward displays of nationalism, whileaffording ample opportunities
to gain access to the new styles currentlyenjoying vogue in Europe
and the United States. Rather like their counter-parts in a
devastated Germany, composers of this persuasion wanted moreor less
to return to a Nullstunde and start from scratch, and thus
foundthemselves in peculiar sympathy with the post-Webernian
generationsdesire for a new international music, as well as later
on with the aes-thetics of Cage and the American experimentalists.
One of the foundermembers of the particular association mentioned
above Jikken Kobo was a young man who had just celebrated his
twenty-first birthday, ToruTakemitsu.
Throughout this chapter, the reader will observe, the focus of
attention
19 Pre-history: how Western music came to Japan
-
has been gradually narrowing: from the broad perspective across
Japanesehistory with which it began, via a concentration
specifically on the devel-opment of Japanese music, to the history
of Western-style compositionoutlined in the preceding pages. Now,
in order to continue the story, it willbe necessary to narrow the
focus even further to revert from the general-ised to the
particular, and examine how the ongoing dynamics of the
rela-tionship between Japan and Western music came to express
themselves inthe career and work of one individual. The detailed
investigation of boththe life and music of this individual,
Takemitsu, will form the matter fordiscussion in the chapters which
follow.
20 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
2 Music and pre-music: Takemitsus early years
Encrypted at one point in the music of Takemitsus late work
Family Tree Musical Verses for Young People (1992) is a kind of
coded biographical allu-sion. When the girl narrator, introducing
us in turn to each member of herfamily, comes to her father, the
music launches suddenly into somethinglike pastiche big-band jazz
of the swing era. For the listener familiar withthe biographical
details of Takemitsus earliest years, his private reasons
forconsidering jazz an apt metaphor for the paternal at this point
are easilyfathomed. Although born on 8 October 1930 in the Hongo
district ofTokyo, within a month of his birth Toru Takemitsu had
joined his fatherTakeo at his place of employment, the town of
Dalian (Luda) in the regionof China then known to the Japanese as
Manchuria, and administered bythem as a colony. There, enjoying a
privileged lifestyle as a member of theexpatriate community, Takeo
Takemitsu had been able to indulge one ofhis favourite passions
more frequently than might otherwise have beenpossible: the
performance of jazz records from his vast personal collection.He
had one or two other musical enthusiasms too, which it is just
possiblemight have had some influence on the developing musical
sensibilities ofhis son: the Takemitsu biographer Kuniharu Akiyama
notes that he was fora while fanatical about playing the
shakuhachi,1 and won first prize at acompetition for making
imitation bird sounds.2 But it was his parentsconstant rehearsal of
his favourite Dixieland, New Orleans Style discsthat clearly left
the most indelible impression on the fledgling composer, tothe
extent that nearly half a century later, in conversation with Seiji
Ozawa,Takemitsu could still recall such names as Kid Ory and his
Creole Bandfrom those days, adding that a little of this jazz music
still remains insideme.3
This assessment is indeed borne out by the composers mature
music inseveral ways and not simply in those instances where jazz
music isdirectly parodied, such as the passage in Family Tree, or
the skilful jazz pas-tiches in the soundtracks for such films as
Karami-ai,4 Tokyo Senso SengoHiwa5 and Natsu no Imoto.6 In
Takemitsus mature concert works as well,the traces of jazz
influence are palpable in such features as the suave har-monic
language (in part arrived at through the influence of
GeorgeRussells Lydian Chromatic theories) and even, towards the end
of thecomposers career, a certain big band style of orchestration.
But in more21
-
general terms, the point to be noted at this stage is that the
strongestmusical impressions of Takemitsus earliest years stemmed
from a sourcethat was Western in origin, and that his reactions to
this stimulus, as vin-dicated by later developments, were
unambiguously positive in nature.
The situation was to prove otherwise with regard to traditional
Japanesemusic. At the age of seven, Takemitsu was sent back to
Tokyo to commencehis primary schooling, his father following him a
year later on account ofill-health, and dying at Kagoshima in 1938
(his mother Raiko was tosurvive until 1983). Takemitsu stayed in
the Akebonocho district with hisuncle, whose wife taught the koto,7
and it was perhaps the association ofthis constant musical presence
with a period of such unhappiness in thecomposers personal life
which caused him to react as negatively as he didto this early
encounter with traditional Japanese music. When I was achild I
lived in Tokyo with my aunt, a koto teacher, the composer was
laterto recall. I heard traditional Japanese music around me all
the time. Forsome reason, it never really appealed to me, never
moved me. Later,hearing traditional Japanese music always recalled
the bitter memories ofthe war.8
As this quotation suggests, the aversion to traditional Japanese
musicwas intensified by the experiences of the war years, when for
reasonshinted at in the previous chapter Japanese music became
associatedwith the dominant culture of militarism, while, as in
Nazi Germany, othergenres were vilified as so much entartete Musik
(or, as the equivalentJapanese expression had it, tekiseiongaku
music of hostile character).And it was precisely at this point that
an experience occurred which wasnot only to reaffirm the positive
connotations with which Western musichad become imbued for
Takemitsu, but which, in the musically deprivedcontext of the war
years, was to strike him with such force as to change thesubsequent
course of his life.
Appropriately enough, it was once again a form of American
popularmusic or, at least, an American popular musician that was
responsiblefor Takemitsus epiphanic conversion. With mobilisation
in 1944,Takemitsus formal education was abruptly curtailed, and he
was sent towork at a military provisions base in Saitama
prefecture, lodged in anunderground dugout deep in the mountains;
the experience, the com-poser later confessed, was an extremely
bitter one.9 On one occasion,however, a newly graduated officer
cadet secretly took a number of theinternees into a back room for a
clandestine recital of proscribed music,using a wind-up gramophone
with a carefully sharpened piece of bambooas a needle. One of the
first items he played, apparently, was LucienneBoyer singing
Parlez-moi damour ; and for Takemitsu at least, accustomed
22 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
by this time to a musical diet consisting solely of patriotic
war songs, theexperience of this music had a revelatory impact
which he was to remem-ber for the rest of his life. For me, hearing
that music came as an enormousshock; I was stunned, and for the
first time I suddenly realised the splendidquality of Western
music.10
As well as reawakening Takemitsus dormant musical sensibilities,
then,this revelatory moment also confirmed the Occidental bias of
his musicalpreferences. And with the cessation of hostilities this
bias was to extend tofar more than matters of musical taste alone.
Like many Japanese of thepost-war years, Takemitsu eagerly embraced
a decidedly Herodian atti-tude of reaction against the discredited
nationalism of the immediate past a kind of gut-level response that
whatever was Japanese should berejected11 coupled with an
enthusiasm for all things Western. The ideo-logical climate of the
post-war American occupation was to afford theyoung Takemitsu ample
opportunity to cultivate this predilection forWestern culture, and
in particular for modern Western music. The occu-pying US
government established what the composer has described as avery big
library in Tokyo to which he went every day to look at scores
allfrom America, none from Europe, with the inevitable result that
he knewAmerican music first, before I knew Schoenberg or Webern.12
They alsoset up a radio station called WVTR, and Takemitsu, at this
period fre-quently bed-ridden on account of ill-health, was able to
spend all my timelistening to the US Armed Forces network,13 who
played various kinds ofmusic (George Gershwin, Debussy and
Mahler).14 (And Messiaen too, atleast according to Kuniharu
Akiyama, who recalled hearing Stokowskiconduct LAscension around
1948, and applied to the station for a copy ofthe recording to
perform at a concert of works on disc.)15 But accordingto
Takemitsus later testimony, at least it is to none of these
modernmasters that thanks are due for the young Takemitsus decision
to become acomposer, but rather to the unlikely stimulus of Csar
Franck. Hearing aradio broadcast of the latters Prelude, Chorale
and Fugue for piano, thecomposer was struck as profoundly by the
quality of Western instrumentalmusic as he had been by the vocal
artistry of Boyer. I had discovered asecond kind of music, namely
the instrumental, the absolute kind. InJapan, word and sound cannot
be separated. But here I was hearing aninstrument being played
alone and awakening astonishing feelings in me.It seemed to me like
a song of peace, a prayer or an aspiration, after I hadlived
through so much suffering . . . At that moment, I decided to become
acomposer.16
Takemitsus later self-assessment as almost an autodidact, a
self-taughtcomposer17 is certainly lent credibility by the manner
in which he set out
23 Music and pre-music: Takemitsus early years
-
initially to realise this ambition without professional guidance
or encour-agement of any sort; but at the same time one should not
fall into the errorof thinking that these earliest musical efforts
were undertaken in utter iso-lation and solitude. For instance,
Takemitsu became a member of anamateur chorus, and it was at the
house of the choirs conductor, TokuakiHamada, that he met another
young composer, Hiroyoshi Suzuki (1931),who was to become something
of a comrade-in-arms during these earlyyears of struggle.18
Together the pair pored over Rimsky-KorsakovsOrchestration and the
scores that lined the shelves of Hamadas home already with a
significant preference for the works of French composerssuch as
Roussel, Faur and (once again) Franck. Shortly after this
justbefore Christmas 1946 there occurred yet another signal event
inTakemitsus life linked in some way with American popular music.
Theyoung composer obtained a years employment at a PX (post
exchange,or recreational facility) attached to the US Army camp at
Yokohama,where it was agreed that, in return for playing jazz
records to the GIs bynight, he might make use of the piano in the
unoccupied hall during theday. The luxury this opportunity
represented for the young Takemitsu inthose years of desperate
post-war privation cannot be overemphasised:until then, the lack of
a piano on which to try out his compositionalexperiments had
reduced him to such extreme ruses as knocking on thehouses of
complete strangers to obtain access to one, or even fabricating
apaper keyboard which could produce sounds only in his own
auralimagination.
In spite of Takemitsus professed aversion for anything Japanese
at thisperiod, both he and Suzuki nevertheless appear to have been
interested intheir own traditional music as well, and even to have
made efforts toassimilate elements from it into the language of
modern Western composi-tion. Such, at least, was the opinion of
Akiyama, who claimed that theyoung composers were at this period
experimenting with the possibilitiesafforded by the ryo, ritsu and
in scales of traditional music a preoccupa-tion which apparently
bore fruit in a series of pentatonic-derived pieceswhich the
seventeen-year-old Takemitsu produced at this time, such as
therather oddly named Kakehi (Conduit).19 The story which
Takemitsuhimself was to tell regarding the genesis of this work,
however, is ratherdifferent: he claimed that he was so shocked to
discover that these penta-tonic elements, with their negative
nationalistic connotations, had creptinto his work subconsciously
that he later destroyed the piece.20
Whichever version of events is correct, however, it is clear
that bothTakemitsu and Suzuki were at this period more
sympathetically disposedtowards the previous generation of Japanese
composers, and in particular
24 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
the nationalist school, than might be expected from the
militantly pro-Western stance Takemitsu claims to have espoused. In
fact one of the pas-times of both composers at this time was
combing the shelves of the Kogasecond-hand bookshop in Kanda for
pre-war sheet music, and it was herethat they came across the Flute
Sonatina by the Japanese nationalist com-poser Kishio Hirao, to
whom they turned in their first attempt to put theirmusical studies
on a more official footing. Unfortunately, they elected
toaccomplish this by means of the rather nave stratagem of simply
turningup unannounced at the composers house, and perhaps
unsurprisingly the unsolicited and, by all accounts, somewhat
shabby visitors were turnedaway at the gate. Six years later,
however, when both Hirao and Takemitsuwere in hospital together,
the elder composer repented of his former brus-querie and promised
the young man a significant propitiatory gift: a copyof his
forthcoming translation of Messiaens Technique de mon
langagemusical.21 Unfortunately, his death soon afterwards
prevented him fromhonouring this pledge.
Rather better fortune was to attend Takemitsus next effort to
apprenticehimself to an established senior composer. While buying a
ticket for theNichi-Bei Contemporary Music Festival of 1948, he
revealed his ambi-tions to the business manager of the Toho Music
Association, who offeredto provide him with an introduction to
another composer of nationalistbent, Yasuji Kiyose. When in due
course Kiyose agreed to meet the youngercomposer, the latter rushed
to his house immediately, only to find himabsent; but Takemitsu
refused to be deterred a second time after his experi-ence with
Hirao, and remained outside the composers home like a Zenacolyte
until he returned in the evening. According to Takemitsus versionof
the story, Kiyose then played some of his music at the piano and
paidhim a compliment that seems particularly apt in the light of
his subse-quent reputation for timbral finesse: He told me that the
sound was beau-tiful, that I was welcome to come again with more
scores; and I wasoverjoyed to hear such things, spoken by a figure
for whom I had suchrespect.22
Kiyose accepted both Takemitsu and Suzuki as pupils, and, later
thatmonth when the Nichi-Bei event took place, introduced them to
twoother senior figures in the Japanese nationalist compositional
world:Yoritsune Matsudaira and Fumio Hayasaka. This pair plus
Kiyosehimself, Kunio Otsuki, Akihiro Tsukatani (b. 1919) and others
hadformed a composers association, the Shinsakkyokuha (New
CompositionGroup), to present their works, to which the young
newcomers weregranted admission two years later. Thus it transpired
that an organisationfounded to further the interests of a group of
conservative and nationalist
25 Music and pre-music: Takemitsus early years
-
composers provided the platform for Takemitsus first exposure to
the lis-tening public. The seventh Shinsakkyokuha recital, in
December 1950,included the premire of Takemitsus solo piano work
Lento in DueMovimenti; but the reception afforded the newcomer by
the Japanese criti-cal fraternity appears to have been a cool one,
to say the least. In conversa-tion with Seiji Ozawa many years
later, Takemitsu was to recall still withobvious bitterness how he
had bought a newspaper in Shinjuku after theperformance, and had
read the harsh review with its crushing final remark:Its
pre-music.23 Everything went totally dark in front of my eyes . .
.there was a cinema right in front of me, I bought a ticket, went
inside, andin a corner of the pitch blackness . . . I just wanted
to cry, and so I cried,thinking it would be best not to write music
any more.24
Yamanes remark about pre-music in fact turned out to be
remarkablyapt, for Takemitsu was to withdraw both this work and its
companionpiece from the Shinsakkyokuha years, Distance de Fe (for
violin and piano,premired at the eighth recital of the group in
1951). Both pieces areomitted from the work list which appears in
the composers manuscriptscore of Tableau Noir (1958), which
acknowledges instead the firstUninterrupted Rest of 1954 as his Op.
1, and, additionally, the score of theLento was as the composer
later expressed it in his preface to the score ofLitany
subsequently lost. Nevertheless, as matters turned out, somemusical
documentation of this period was to survive in one form oranother,
and it is on the basis of this that the following speculations on
thecompositional preoccupations of Takemitsus pre-musical years
areoffered.
Dbut of the Lento composer
Takemitsu may have destroyed the score of Kakehi, but he did not
succeedin eradicating all evidence of his juvenile
pentatonic-nationalist sympa-thies. In the possession of the
Documentation Centre for ModernJapanese Music in Tokyo is the
manuscript score of a short piano composi-tion dated 26 June 1949
and bearing the title Romance.25 The score is pref-aced by a
respectful dedication to Kiyose sensei,26 and most of the musicin
the three pages which follow would have been very much in accord
withthe aesthetic ideals of the nineteen-year-old composers
folkloristic-minded teacher. The most immediately striking of such
preoccupations isthe modal and, specifically, the Japanese-sounding
character of themusical material. Throughout the work, only eight
pitch-classes aresounded G, Gs, A, Bb, C, Cs, D and Eb but, of
these, Cs is not heardagain after bar 19, and both this pitch and
Gs clearly function only as
26 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
adjuncts to the basic six-note minor mode. Furthermore, such
passagesas the melody which eventually emerges in bar 21 (Ex. 1)
suggest that thissix-note scale is in reality the conflation of two
pentatonic scales ofJapanese origin: the descending form of the in
scale (hereDBbAGEb), which is employed as far as the Bb in bar 24,
and the samescales ascending version (DEbGAC), which is used from
the follow-ing Cn onwards.
Another marker which locates the work firmly within the
Japanese-nationalist tradition is the non-functional harmony
derived from verti-calisations of pitches abstracted from the basic
modal collection, withparticular emphasis on interval classes other
than the major and minorthirds of traditional Western practice. For
example, in bars 467, thefalling fourth incipit of Example 1 is
accompanied by a bass collectionwhich, together with the An of the
melody, projects all five pitches of thedescending in scale
simultaneously. Such collections tend to be highly dis-sonant, of
course, and it is as intensifiers of this dissonance that the
extra-neous Cs and Gs make their appearance, always occurring in
closeproximity, respectively, to the Cn and Gn of the basic modal
collection, likeout-of-tune versions of the correct pitches. This
perhaps reflects an
27 Music and pre-music: Takemitsus early years
Ex. 1 Romance, bars 217
-
anecdotal intention, and one which again relates the work to the
aestheticsof the nationalist school: the attempt by such means to
simulate themicrotonal inflections of traditional Japanese
instruments.
On the other hand, although there is clearly much that is
derivative ofthat tradition within this early work, there are also
many prophetic point-ers towards Takemitsus later development. One
such feature is that mostprominently nationalistic aspect of the
work itself, its use of modality atechnical feature which was to
provide the foundations for a harmonic andmelodic style that lasted
Takemitsu throughout his creative life. The com-poser once
confessed that he was seriously interested in the idea ofmode,27
and as Akiyama was to note, this is something which has notchanged
from his very early period up to the present day.28 What didchange,
however, was the type of modal material in which Takemitsu
wasinterested: the Japanese pentatonic scales, with their negative
nationalisticassociations, were soon to be jettisoned, yet the
basic methods of manipu-lating them which Takemitsu had learned
were to serve him well whenapplied to other scale collections. Thus
Timothy Koozin is surely rightwhen he asserts that the idea of a
scale-based compositional idiom asfound in these early works sets
an important precedent for Takemitsuslater use of octatonic and
whole-tone collections in the piano works29
(although the types of materials employed, as we shall see,
derived from afar wider-ranging thesaurus of scales than simply the
two types Koozinmentions here). In particular, the verticalisation
of modally derived pitch-materials as a source of harmony was to
prove a life-long resource of thecomposers technical vocabulary; as
was the intensification of such collec-tions by the addition of
chromatic pitches external to the mode in ques-tion: mode, the
composer once explicitly acknowledged, interests mebecause it does
not reject sounds from outside the scale.30 And if the
aboveassumption concerning the function of such extraneous pitches
inRomance is correct, it is perhaps ironic that this powerful
harmonicresource might have had its origins in an early, anecdotal
desire to imitatethe sounds of traditional Japanese music.
Another prophetic hint of what was to become something of
aTakemitsu trademark is the literal repetition of whole passages
and espe-cially, as here, the repetition of the opening material as
a sign of imminentclosure. But perhaps the most characteristic
traits of all are those impliedby the performance indications at
the head of the score: Adagio sostenuto nobile funeral [sic].
Takemitsu once remarked in a film interview thatJapanese people
have no sense of Allegro,31 and while this is not necessarilytrue
of all Japanese music (which includes, for example, some quite
livelyfolksongs), it certainly reflects the composers own general
predilection for
28 The music of Toru Takemitsu
-
slower tempo categories. Examples abound in his scores of tempo
valuesthat lie at the lower end, or even outside the range, of
those to be found on aconventional metronome: for example, the
first movement ofUninterrupted Rest has the indication = 48 and the
second is prefaced bythe instruction to perform whole bars at the
tempo MM20 = 3 sec.; whilein Autumn the sub-metronomic tempo of
Extremely slow, = 30 isrequired at one point. According to the
conductor Hiroyuki Iwaki, thisabsence of Allegra reflects
Takemitsus own technical awkwardness as hecomposed at the keyboard
in those early years in the same way that thecomposers fondness for
soft dynamics originally stemmed from a desirenot to be a nuisance
to his benefactors when practising at the houses ofstrangers.32 But
it is at the same time surely a reflection of a personal
tem-peramental propensity, one revealed by the second part of the
Romanceperforming directions. The obvious influence of composers
such asDebussy and Messiaen on Takemitsus musical language has
tended toresult in an emphasis among commentators upon the
im-pressionisticqualities of his music; but, at the same time, it
should not be overlookedthat his music from the very beginning
permitted itself the ex-pression ofat least one emotional state as
well: that of a profound, dignified melan-choly. This may indeed be
a personal feeling, Takemitsu was to confess atone point, but the
joy of music, ultimately, seems connected with sadness.The sadness
is that of existence. The more you are filled with the pure
hap-piness of music-making, the deeper the sadness is.33
These typical qualities of mood and tempo are of course implicit
in thevery title of the Takemitsu composition which marked the
official dbutof the artist Funayama was later to describe as the
Lento composer.34 Asnoted above, the score of this work Lento in
Due Movimenti has beenlost, and while urban myths of its survival
in some form abound amongstthe Tokyo musical community, no
documentation of this work has beenavailable for the present
authors researches. Two textual sources do never-theless exist to
provide the commentator with materials for a certainamount of
albeit very tentative speculation. The first is a reconstruc-tion
of the composers sketches for the pianist Fujiwara, which exists as
aCD recording played by Kazuoki Fuji;35 the second is Litany In
Memory ofMichael Vyner (1990), a work Takemitsu described as a
recompositionfrom memory of the original, and whose title perhaps
suggests somecryptic word-play the Japanese for litany, rento,
being a near-homo-phone of the title of the original work. There
are considerable differencesbetween these two versions, and of
course in the case of the recordedversion no score exists to
support definitively any close analytical readings;but with these
qualifications in mind, it is still possible to make some
29 Music and pre-music: Takemitsus early years
-
general observations about certa