Tōru Takemitsu
Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, pronounced [takeꜜmitsɯ̥ toːɾɯ]; 8 October 1930 – 20 February 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu was admired for the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre.[1][2] He is known for combining elements of oriental and occidental philosophy and for fusing sound with silence and tradition with innovation.[3]
In this Japanese name, the surname is Takemitsu.
Tōru Takemitsu
He composed several hundred independent works of music, scored more than ninety films and published twenty books.[3] He was also a founding member of the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) in Japan, a group of avant-garde artists who distanced themselves from academia and whose collaborative work is often regarded among the most influential of the 20th century.[4][5]
His 1957 Requiem for string orchestra attracted international attention, led to several commissions from across the world and established his reputation as the leading 20th-century Japanese composer.[6] He was the recipient of numerous awards and honours and the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award is named after him.[7]
Biography[edit]
Youth[edit]
Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on 8 October 1930; a month later his family moved to Dalian in the Chinese province of Liaoning. In 1938 he returned to Japan to attend elementary school, but his education was cut short by military conscription in 1944.[2] Takemitsu described his experience of military service at such a young age, under the Japanese Nationalist government, as "... extremely bitter".[8] Takemitsu first became conscious of Western classical music during his term of military service, in the form of a popular French Song ("Parlez-moi d'amour") which he listened to with colleagues in secret, played on a gramophone with a makeshift needle fashioned from bamboo.[8][9]
During the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan, Takemitsu worked for the U.S. Armed Forces, but was ill for a long period. Hospitalised and bed-ridden, he took the opportunity to listen to as much Western music as he could on the U.S. Armed Forces network. While deeply affected by these experiences of Western music, he simultaneously felt a need to distance himself from the traditional music of his native Japan. He explained much later, in a lecture at the New York International Festival of the Arts, that for him Japanese traditional music "always recalled the bitter memories of war".[8]
Despite his lack of musical training, and taking inspiration from what little Western music he had heard, Takemitsu began to compose in earnest at the age of 16: "... I began [writing] music attracted to music itself as one human being. Being in music I found my raison d'être as a man. After the war, music was the only thing. Choosing to be in music clarified my identity."[10] Though he studied briefly with Yasuji Kiyose beginning in 1948, Takemitsu remained largely self-taught throughout his musical career.[2]
Early development and Jikken Kōbō[edit]
In 1948, Takemitsu conceived the idea of electronic music technology, or in his own words, to "bring noise into tempered musical tones inside a busy small tube." During the 1950s, Takemitsu had learned that in 1948 "a French [engineer] Pierre Schaeffer invented the method(s) of musique concrète based on the same idea as mine. I was pleased with this coincidence."[11][12]
In 1951, Takemitsu was a founding member of the anti-academic Jikken Kōbō (実験工房, "experimental workshop"): an artistic group established for multidisciplinary collaboration on mixed-media projects, who sought to avoid Japanese artistic tradition.[13] The performances and works undertaken by the group introduced several contemporary Western composers to Japanese audiences.[2][14] During this period he wrote Saegirarenai Kyūsoku I ("Uninterrupted Rest I", 1952: a piano work, without a regular rhythmic pulse or barlines); and by 1955 Takemitsu had begun to use electronic tape-recording techniques in such works as Relief Statique (1955) and Vocalism A·I (1956).[2] Takemitsu also studied in the early 1950s with the composer Fumio Hayasaka, perhaps best known for the scores he wrote for films by Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, the latter of whom Takemitsu would collaborate with decades later.
In the late 1950s chance brought Takemitsu international attention: his Requiem for string orchestra (1957), written as an homage to Hayasaka, was heard by Igor Stravinsky in 1958 during his visit to Japan. (The NHK had organised opportunities for Stravinsky to listen to some of the latest Japanese music; when Takemitsu's work was put on by mistake, Stravinsky insisted on hearing it to the end.) At a press conference later, Stravinsky expressed his admiration for the work, praising its "sincerity" and "passionate" writing.[15] Stravinsky subsequently invited Takemitsu to lunch; and for Takemitsu this was an "unforgettable" experience.[16] After Stravinsky returned to the U.S., Takemitsu soon received a commission for a new work from the Koussevitsky Foundation which, he assumed, had come as a suggestion from Stravinsky to Aaron Copland.[16] For this he composed Dorian Horizon, (1966), which was premièred by the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Copland.[16]
Influence of Cage; interest in traditional Japanese music[edit]
During his time with Jikken Kōbō, Takemitsu came into contact with the experimental work of John Cage; but when the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi returned from his studies in America in 1961, he gave the first Japanese performance of Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. This left a "deep impression" on Takemitsu: he recalled the impact of hearing the work when writing an obituary for Cage, 31 years later.[17] This encouraged Takemitsu in his use of indeterminate procedures and graphic-score notation, for example in the graphic scores of Ring (1961), Corona for pianist(s) and Corona II for string(s) (both 1962). In these works each performer is presented with cards printed with coloured circular patterns which are freely arranged by the performer to create "the score".[18]
Although the immediate influence of Cage's procedures did not last in Takemitsu's music—Coral Island, for example for soprano and orchestra (1962) shows significant departures from indeterminate procedures partly as a result of Takemitsu's renewed interest in the music of Anton Webern—certain similarities between Cage's philosophies and Takemitsu's thought remained. For example, Cage's emphasis on timbres within individual sound-events, and his notion of silence "as plenum rather than vacuum", can be aligned with Takemitsu's interest in ma.[19] Furthermore, Cage's interest in Zen practice (through his contact with Zen scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki) seems to have resulted in a renewed interest in the East in general, and ultimately alerted Takemitsu to the potential for incorporating elements drawn from Japanese traditional music into his composition:
Personal life[edit]
He was married to Asaka Takemitsu (formerly Wakayama) for 42 years. She first met Toru in 1951, cared for him when he was suffering from tuberculosis in his early twenties, then married him in 1954. They had one child, a daughter named Maki. Asaka attended most premieres of his music and published a memoir of their life together in 2010.[41]
Legacy[edit]
In a memorial issue of Contemporary Music Review, Jō Kondō wrote, "Needless to say, Takemitsu is among the most important composers in Japanese music history. He was also the first Japanese composer fully recognized in the west, and remained the guiding light for the younger generations of Japanese composers."[32]
Composer Peter Lieberson shared the following in his program note to The Ocean that has no East and West, written in memory of Takemitsu: "I spent the most time with Toru in Tokyo when I was invited to be a guest composer at his Music Today Festival in 1987. Peter Serkin and composer Oliver Knussen were also there, as was cellist Fred Sherry. Though he was the senior of our group by many years, Toru stayed up with us every night and literally drank us under the table. I was confirmed in my impression of Toru as a person who lived his life like a traditional Zen poet."[82]
On the death of his friend, the pianist Roger Woodward composed "In Memoriam Toru Takemitsu" for unaccompanied violoncello. Woodward [83] recalled concerts with Takemitsu in Australia, the Decca Studios and Roundhouse, London and at the 1976 ' Music Today' Festival, with Kinshi Tsuruta and Katsuya Yokoyama; Takemitu's dedication of "For Away", "Corona" (London Version) and "Undisturbed Rest" and of the inspirational leadership he provided Woodward's generation: " From all composers with whom I ever worked it was Toru Takemitsu who understood the inner workings of music and sound on a level unmatched by anyone else. His profound humility concealed an immense knowledge of Occidental and Oriental cultures which greatly extended historical contributions of Debussy and Messiaen."
In the foreword to a selection of Takemitsu's writings in English, conductor Seiji Ozawa writes: "I am very proud of my friend Toru Takemitsu. He is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition."[84]
Takemitsu won awards for composition, both in Japan and abroad,[85][86][87] including the Prix Italia for his orchestral work Tableau noir in 1958, the Otaka Prize in 1976 and 1981, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award in 1987 (for the film score Ran) and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1994 (for Fantasma/Cantos).[2] In Japan, he received the Film Awards of the Japanese Academy for outstanding achievement in music, for soundtracks to the following films:
He was also invited to attend numerous international festivals throughout his career, and presented lectures and talks at academic institutions across the world. He was made an honorary member of the Akademie der Künste of the DDR in 1979, and the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1985. He was admitted to the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985, and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1986. He was the recipient of the 22nd Suntory Music Award (1990). Posthumously, Takemitsu received an Honorary Doctorate from Columbia University Archived 8 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine early in 1996 and was awarded the fourth Glenn Gould Prize in fall 1996.
The Toru Takemitsu Composition Award, intended to "encourage a younger generation of composers who will shape the coming age through their new musical works", is named after him.[7]