Takemitsu, Tōru

(b Tokyo, 8 Oct 1930; d Tokyo, 20 Feb 1996). Japanese composer. A month after his birth he was taken to China, where his father was working. In 1938 he returned to Japan to attend elementary school, but his formal education was interrupted by conscription in 1944. It was during his military service that he had his first encounter with Western music, which had been banned in Japan during the war; a military officer played a gramophone recording of the French chanson Parlez-moi d'amour to him and a group of fellow-conscripts. The song left a deep impression, and when, after the war, Takemitsu was employed at an American military base, he took the opportunity to listen to a good deal of Western music on the radio network set up for the US armed forces. At the age of 16 he decided, notwithstanding his lack of musical training, to take up composition. He received intermittent instruction with Kiyose from 1948, but was otherwise essentially self-taught.

Early on he identified Debussy as a mentor, and his fellow-composer Ichiyanagi introduced him to the music of Messiaen. Messiaen's influence is already apparent in Takemitsu's first performed work, Lento in due movimenti (1950) for piano, which was given at the seventh concert of the New Group of Composers, headed by Kiyose. The work already embodied what would became characteristic elements of Takemitsu's musical language – modal melodies emerging from a chromatic background, the suspension of regular metre and an acute sensitivity to register and timbre. The première was received rather coldly, but there were two enthusiastic supporters in the audience, Yuasa and Akiyama, who were to remain his friends. In 1951, together with other musicians and artists, the three founded a new group, the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), for collaboration on mixed media projects. For this association Takemitsu composed Saegirarenai kyūsoku I (‘Uninterrupted Rest I’, 1952) for piano, written in irregular rhythm without barlines, and the Chamber Concerto (1955) for 13 wind instruments. He then turned to electronic music in Relief statique (1955) and Vocalism A·I (1956); the latter uses only the phonemes ‘a’ and ‘i’ (‘ai’ being the Japanese for ‘love’) pronounced in various ways by two actors. Material is similarly restricted in Mizu no kyoku (‘Water Music’, 1960), formed exclusively from recorded water sounds. Many of Takemitsu's works from the early 1960s are characterized by textural fragmentation. In works such as Ring (1961) and Sacrifice (1962) non-sustaining instruments – such as terz guitar, lute and vibraphone – predominate, and the texture is pointillistic, featuring pizzicato, harmonics and wide intervals.

By this time, Takemitsu's work was starting to attract international attention. His Requiem for strings (1957), dedicated to the memory of Hayasaka, was heard in 1959 by Stravinsky, who declared it a masterpiece, commenting on the music's unbroken intensity. Kanshō (‘Coral Island’) received favourable mention at the 1962 ISCM Festival, and Textures for orchestra gained the first prize in 1965. In 1964 Takemitsu was invited by the East-West Center of Hawaii to give a series of lectures in conjunction with Cage; later in the same year he staged happenings with Cage and Ichiyanagi in Tokyo. Cage's influence was to prove decisive less in terms of techniques of indeterminacy, which Takemitsu had already employed in the graphic scores of Ring (1961) and Pianisuto no tame no Corona (Corona for pianist(s), 1962), than in terms of the American composer's fascination with Japanese culture, which encouraged Takemitsu to begin his first serious exploration of the traditional music of his native country. As he commented in 1988, ‘in my own development for a long period I struggled to avoid being “Japanese”, to avoid “Japanese” qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition’. From the early 1960s onwards Takemitsu began to make use of Japanese traditional instruments. He used the biwa in his score for the film Seppuku (1962), and from that point on employed Japanese instruments frequently in his music for the cinema, radio and television.

In 1966 he wrote his first concert work for traditional instruments, Eclipse for biwa and shakuhachi, which was widely performed by the virtuosos Kinshi Tsuruta and Katsuya Yokoyama. When he was commissioned in 1967 to write a piece for the 125th anniversary of the New York PO, it was to the same two instruments and performers that he turned, producing a sort of double concerto, November Steps. Takemitsu's stated aim in the composition was a juxtaposition of the Japanese and Western instruments in a way that emphasized their differences of sonority, rather than potential correspondences. However, correspondences do emerge: the sound of the biwa's plectrum plucking the string is reflected in the percussive effects among the orchestra's strings, such as the striking of the body of the instrument, while the use of dense, chromatic clusters, often combined with glissandos, provides an orchestral counterpart to the force and litheness of breath passing through the pipe of the shakuhachi. The sounds of the two instruments are thereby harmonized with the Western orchestra without a weakening of their general sound characteristics. In subsequent works Takemitsu employed instruments drawn from other non-Western traditions: in Gitimalya (1974) the solo marimba is complemented by an array of percussion which includes Chinese and Javanese gongs and an African log-drum.

During the 1970s Takemitsu gradually turned away from these dense textures of chromatic clusters and sound masses towards a greater harmonic and timbral differentiation. Garden Rain (1974), his first work for brass instruments, is characterized by slow-moving, widely-spaced chords, which show little inclination towards directional harmonic motion, while Shiki (‘Seasons’, 1970) for four percussionists makes exclusive use of pitched metallic percussion, rather than the arrays of unpitched instruments employed in the works of the previous two decades. Also in the 1970s Takemitsu began to state his ideas on form. Speaking of Quatrain (1975) for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and orchestra, he compared the work to ‘a picture scroll unrolled’: ‘the scenes change successively without a break. In other words, it is similar to the relationship of a garden and a person walking through it’. The form of Quatrain is strongly determined by the number four, reflected in the four-bar phrases, the prevalent interval of the fourth and the four concertante instruments (Takemitsu's choice of the quartet of Messiaen's Quatuor pour le fin de temps was a conscious homage). One of his most celebrated orchestral works, Tori wa hoshigata no niwa ni oriru (‘A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden’, 1977), once more combines the image of the Japanese garden with all-pervading numerology. Here the image is not of walking through the garden, but of approaching it from a distance: the flock, represented principally by the solo oboe with its mobile but sharply contoured melodic figures, traverses a comparatively static succession of harmonic fields, symbolizing the garden. These fields are based on the serial transformation (by means of a rotational array) of an anhemitonic pentatonic collection (see Ohtake, 29–33). Five further five-note fields, varied and often dissonant in their intervallic structure, are thus generated, enabling a harmonic motion in the course of the work from a pure pentatonicism at the opening to dense chromatic complexes and back again.

Throughout A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, the note F-sharp (the central pitch-class of the source pentatonic collection) provides a consistent focus amid the gradual harmonic transformations. In Yume mado (‘Dream/Window’, 1985) a pedal D serves a similar function, anchoring statements of the striking, four-note motivic gesture which recurs in various instrumental and rhythmic guises throughout the piece. Most of the works of the 1980s and 90s involve a stronger degree of tonal focus than those of the previous two decades, but only occasionally – as in Keizu (‘Family Tree’, 1992), a work for narrator and orchestra, where the harmonic allusions range from Ravel to American popular song – does this involve passages of straightforward diatonic tonality. In the early 1980s, Takemitsu wrote three compositions based on Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: Toi yobigoe no kanata e! (‘Far calls, coming far!’, 1980) for violin and orchestra, A Way a Lone (1981) for string quartet, and Riverrun (1984) for piano and orchestra. All three works embody images of water, a continual and obsessive interest of Takemitsu’s dating back to Water Music (1960). In the first of the three compositions, the principal material is a six-note theme, E–E–A–C–F–A, and its inversion, the first three notes of the theme being a cipher for the word ‘sea’ (E = S in German). This melody, with its predominance of diatonic intervals – major and minor 3rds and perfect 4ths – mutates in its tone-colours, transforming itself into textures of varied resonance as it touches on different groups of instruments within the orchestra. This increasingly linear orientation – equally evident in chamber works such as Umi e (‘Toward the Sea’, 1981) for alto flute and guitar (together with its two additional versions from 1981 and 1989, all again based on the ‘sea’ cipher) and Jūichigatsu no kiri to kiku no kanata kara (‘From Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November Fog’, 1983) for violin and piano – is related to Takemitsu's fundamental notion of cantos (melody or song): ‘the song I would like to sing’, he commented in the 1990s, ‘is not a simple lyric line but more than this – a narrative line intertwined with many threads’. The title of Fantasma/Cantos (1991) for clarinet and orchestra epitomizes this equation between song and fantasy, characteristic of Takemitsu's music from the beginning. Meanwhile the ‘narrative line’ leads him into the domain of quotation in his work for two pianos and orchestra Yume no in’yo (‘Quotation of Dream’, 1991), whose subtitle, ‘Say Sea, Take Me!’, drawn from a poem by Emily Dickinson, is reflected in the integration of number of passages from Debussy's La mer. While conspicuous and undisguised, the quotations create no sense of irony or stylistic rupture, Takemitsu's orchestral textures sharing with Debussy's a refinement, luminosity and remarkable transparency that caused him to be regarded, by the end of his life, as one of the finest orchestrators of the late 20th century.

The first prize Takemitsu won outside Japan, the Prix Italia for his orchestral work Tableau noir (1958), was followed up by numerous other awards in his lifetime, including the Otaka Prize (1976 and 1981), the Los Angeles Film Critics Award (1987, for the film score Ran) and the Grawemeyer Award (1994, for Fantasma/Cantos). He was invited as featured composer to many international music festivals, including Aldeburgh (1984 and 1993), Tanglewood (1986) and Wien Modern (1993), and was also a regular guest lecturer, especially in the USA, where he visited Yale University (1975), the State University of New York, Buffalo (1977), the University of California, San Diego (1981) and Columbia University (1989) among other institutions. He received honorary membership of the Akademie der Künste of the DDR (1979) and the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1985), and in France was admitted to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985) and the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1986).

Takemitsu published a large number of essays and other writings in which he often discussed his own works. He was popular as a speaker and interviewed many composers on their visits to Tokyo, including Cage, Xenakis, Nono, Shchedrin, Ligeti and Berio. Late in his life, Takemitsu conceived an idea of composing an opera, but his untimely death prevented him from realizing the plan.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

YOKO NARAZAKI (with MASAKATA KANAZAWA)

Takemitsu, Tōru

WORKS

(selective list)

orchestral

chamber and solo instrumental

piano

film scores

(selective list)

other works

Takemitsu, Tōru

WRITINGS

Oto, chinmoku to hakariaeru hodo ni [As much as can be measured with sound and silence] (Tokyo, 1971)

Ki no kagami, sōgen no kagami [Tree’s mirror, prairie’s mirror] (Tokyo, 1975)

Sōzō no shūhen [Around creations] (Tokyo, 1976) [interview]

Ongaku [Music] (Tokyo, 1981) [correspondence with Seiji Ozawa]

Yume no in’yō [Quotations of dream] (Tokyo, 1984)

‘A Mirror and an Egg’, Soundings, xii (1984–5), 3–6

Yume to kazu: ongaku no gohō [Dream and number: musical diction] (Tokyo, 1987)

‘Contemporary Music in Japan’, PNM, xxvii (1989), 198–214

Opera wo tsukuru [Creating an opera] (Tokyo, 1990) [correspondence with Kenzaburō Ōe]

Uta no tsubasa, kotoba no tsue [Wings of songs, canes of words] (Tokyo, 1993) [interview]

Tōi yobigoe no kanata e [Far calls, coming far!] (Tokyo, 1993)

ed. Y. Kakudo and G. Glasow: Confronting Silence (Berkeley, 1995)

Jikan no entei [A gardener of time] (Tokyo, 1996)

Takemitsu Tōru chosaku shū [Collection of writings by Takemitsu] (Tokyo, 2000–)

Takemitsu, Tōru

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Rands and R. Reynolds: ‘Two Views of Takemitsu’, MT, cxxviii (1987), 477–86

E. Smaldone: ‘Japanese and Western Confluences in Large-Scale Pitch Organization of Tōru Takemitsu's November Steps and Autumn’, PNM, xxvii/2 (1989), 216–31

T. Koozin: ‘Tōru Takemitsu and the Unity of Opposites’, College Music Symposium, xxx/1 (1990), 34–44

T. Koozin: ‘Octatonicism in Recent Solo Piano Works of Tōru Takemitsu’, PNM, xxix/1 (1991), 124–41

J. Yuasa and others: ‘Takemitsu Tōru’, Polyphone, viii (1991), 5–12, 14–57, 79–100, 114–62, 175–98, 235–41

N. Ohtake: Creative Sources for the Music of Tōru Takemitsu (Brookfield, VT, 1993)

Takashi Funayama: ‘Takemitsu Tōru kenkyū nōto’ [Study notes on Takemitsu], Ongaku geijutsu, lii/12 (1994), 31–43; liii (1995), no.1, pp.48–55; no.2, pp.60–67; no.3, pp.46–55; no.4, pp.48–53; no.5, pp.66–72; no.6, pp.40–46; no.8, pp.66–75; no.9, pp.59–67; no.10, pp.74–81; no.11, pp.74–9; no.12, pp.31–43; liv (1996), no.2, pp.68–74; no.3, pp.58–65; no.4, pp.50–57; no.5, pp.74–81; no.6, pp.48–51; no.9, pp.60–63; no.11, pp.62–6; lv/12 (1997), 22–6; lvi (1998), no.1, pp.90–93; no.4, pp.46–9

Y. Narazaki: Takemitsu Tōru to Miyoshi Akira no sakkyoku yōshiki: muchōsei to ongun sakuhō wo megutte [The compositional style of Tōru Takemitsu and Akira Miyoshi: atonality and tone cluster] (Tokyo, 1994)

K. Miyamoto: Klang im Osten, Klang im Westen: der Komponist Tōru Takemitsu … und die Rezeptio europäischer Musik in Japan (Saarbrücken, 1996)

Y. Narazaki and others: ‘Tsuitō: Takemitsu Tōru’ [In memory of Takemitsu], Ongaku geijutsu, liv/5 (1996), 18–73 [incl. list of works]

T. Funayama: Takemitsu Tōru: hibiki no umi e [Tōru Takemitsu: towards the sea of sound] (Tokyo, 1998)