was a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music and writer on music. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu was admired for his subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre.McKenzie, Don, "Review: [Untitled] Reviewed Work(s): To the Edge of Dream, for Guitar and Orchestra", Notes, 2nd Ser., vol. 46, no. 1. (Music Library Association, September 1989), 230.
In his early years, Takemitsu was also a founding member of the 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.
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. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honours and founded the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award.
Biography Youth Tōru Takemitsu was born on 8 October 1930 in the northern Hongō district of Tokyo. The family moved a month later to the then Japanese-controlled Dalian, Manchuria, where Tōru's father Takeo Takemitsu, was a government official. After his father's early death in 1938, Tōru's mother Reiko sent him back to Japan to attend elementary (1938–1943) and middle school (1944). He lived with an aunt and uncle, again in Hongō, Tokyo but his education was cut short aged fourteen by the Japanese Nationalist government's military conscription, which he described as an "extremely bitter" experience.Takemitsu, Tōru, "Contemporary Music in Japan", Perspectives of New Music, vol. 27, no. 2, (Summer 1989), 3. 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.
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 bedridden with tuberculosis, 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".
Despite his lack of musical training, Takemitsu began to compose in earnest at the age of 16, taking inspiration from what little Western music he had heard: "... 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."Quoted in Ohtake 1993, 3. Though he studied briefly with Yasuji Kiyose beginning in 1948, Takemitsu remained largely self-taught throughout his musical career.
Early development and Jikken Kōbō In 1948, Takemitsu conceived the idea of electroacoustic music technology, or in his own words, to "bring noise into tempered musical tones inside a busy small tube." During the 1950s, he had learned that in the same year "a French [engineer] Pierre Schaeffer invented the method(s) of musique concrète based on the same idea as [his]", and was pleased by the coincidence.
Takemitsu was a founding member of the anti-academic : an artistic group established in 1951 for multidisciplinary collaboration on mixed-media projects, who sought to avoid Japanese artistic tradition.Schlüren, Christoph, "Review: Peter Burt, 'The Music of Toru Takemitsu' (Cambridge 2001)", Tempo no. 57, (Cambridge, 2003), 65. The performances and works undertaken by the group introduced several contemporary Western composers to Japanese audiences. 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). Takemitsu was also assistant to the composer Fumio Hayasaka around this time, who was perhaps best known for his scores for the films Rashomon and Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa; Takemitsu would collaborate with Kurosawa himself 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. Stravinsky subsequently invited Takemitsu to lunch; and for Takemitsu this was an "unforgettable" experience.Takemitsu, Tōru [with Tania Cronin and Hilary Tann], "Afterword", Perspectives of New Music, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 1989), 205–207. 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. For this he composed Dorian Horizon, (1966), which was premièred by the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Copland.
Influence of Cage; interest in traditional Japanese music 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. 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".
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.See Burt, 96 and Takemitsu, "Afterword", 212. 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:
I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage. The reason for this is that in my own life, 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.
For Takemitsu, as he explained later in a lecture in 1988, one performance of Japanese traditional music stood out:
One day I chanced to see a performance of the Bunraku puppet theater and was very surprised by it. It was in the tone quality, the timbre, of the futazao shamisen, the wide-necked shamisen used in Bunraku, that I first recognized the splendor of traditional Japanese music. I was very moved by it and I wondered why my attention had never been captured before by this Japanese music.
Thereafter, he resolved to study all types of traditional Japanese music, paying special attention to the differences between the two very different musical traditions, in a diligent attempt to "bring forth the sensibilities of Japanese music that had always been within [him]". This was no easy task, since in the years following the war traditional music was largely overlooked and ignored: only one or two "masters" continued to keep their art alive, often meeting with public indifference. In conservatoria across the country, even students of traditional instruments were always required to learn the piano.Smaldone, Edward, "Japanese and Western Confluences in Large-Scale Pitch Organization of Tōru Takemitsu's November Steps and Autumn", Perspectives of New Music, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer, 1989), 217.
From the early 1960s, Takemitsu began to make use of traditional Japanese instruments in his music, and even took up playing the biwa—an instrument he used in his score for the film Seppuku (1962). In 1967, Takemitsu received a commission from the New York Philharmonic, to commemorate the orchestra's 125th anniversary, for which he wrote November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra. Initially, Takemitsu had great difficulty in uniting these instruments from such different musical cultures in one work. Eclipse for biwa and shakuhachi (1966) illustrates Takemitsu's attempts to find a viable notational system for these instruments, which in normal circumstances neither sound together nor are used in works notated in any system of Western staff notation.
The first performance of November Steps was given in 1967, under Seiji Ozawa. Despite the trials of writing such an ambitious work, Takemitsu maintained "that making the attempt was very worthwhile because what resulted somehow liberated music from a certain stagnation and brought to music something distinctly new and different". The work was distributed widely in the West when it was coupled as the fourth side of an LP release of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony.
In 1972, Takemitsu, accompanied by Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, and others, heard Balinese gamelan music in Bali. The experience influenced the composer on a largely philosophical and theological level. For those accompanying Takemitsu on the expedition (most of whom were French musicians), who "... could not keep their composure as I did before this music: it was too foreign for them to be able to assess the resulting discrepancies with their logic", the experience was without precedent. For Takemitsu, however, by now quite familiar with his own native musical tradition, there was a relationship between "the sounds of the gamelan, the tone of the kapachi, the unique scales and rhythms by which they are formed, and Japanese traditional music which had shaped such a large part of my sensitivity".Takemitsu, Mirrors, 69–70. In his solo piano work For Away (written for Roger Woodward in 1973), a single, complex line is distributed between the pianist's hands, which reflects the interlocking patterns between the metallophones of a gamelan orchestra.
A year later, Takemitsu returned to the instrumental combination of shakuhachi, biwa, and orchestra, in the less well known work Autumn (1973). The significance of this work is revealed in its far greater integration of the traditional Japanese instruments into the orchestral discourse; whereas in November Steps, the two contrasting instrumental ensembles perform largely in alternation, with only a few moments of contact. Takemitsu expressed this change in attitude: But now my attitude is getting to be a little different, I think. Now my concern is mostly to find out what there is in common ... Autumn was written after November Steps. I really wanted to do something which I hadn't done in November Steps, not to blend the instruments, but to integrate them.Takemitsu, "Afterword", 210.