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A tiny, delicate man, standing just over 5ft high, Takemitsu was a giant in Japanese cultural life and in international contemporary music. He wrote hundreds of works for the concert platform, as well as 93 film scores, a detective novel and critical works on music, film and literature. A leading intellectual, he also had an insatiable appetite for popular culture. He was a fanatical cinema-goer, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Western pop music. He had a famous sense of humour and a prodigious gift for friendship, counting among his close friends John Cage, Morton Feldman, Oliver Knussen, Seiji Ozawa and many other leading artists and musicians. |
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'I am self taught, but I consider Debussy my teacher' 'My teachers are Duke Ellington and nature' -'I have recognised my own culture through studying modern Western music'. 'I feel a deep reverence for the precise workings and the great order in nature, and still wish to learn more from nature as I compose music' As a young man, Takemitsu had a long illness, and lay for several years in bed listening to post-war American military radio. This instilled a knowledge and love of jazz and for Western classical music. From Debussy, who impressed him particularly, he identified 'colour, light and shadow' as important elements. This pervades all of his music, but is most explicit in Green for orchestra, which he described as 'an attempt to enter the secrets of Debussy's music' He assimilated influences from Western Avant Garde music. Sonic experimentation from Stockhausen and Cage, precision and economy from Morton Feldman, opulent colours and ecstatic sensuality from Messiaen. Only gradually did Takemitsu, in common with many other Japanese artists after the second world war, acknowledge influences from Japanese traditional culture in his work. Gradually, however, he began to allow Japanese traditional sounds and a more explicitly Japanese sensibility into his music November Steps is a concerto for biwa (Japanese lute) and shakuhachi (bamboo flute), and In an Autumn Garden is a major work for Gagaku, the Japanese court orchestra. Characterised by a haunting and seemingly endless melody played on flutesryteiki, hichiriki (shawms) backed by mouth organs (sho) and drums. Nature is a constant background to Takemitsu's music, and is reflected in many of his titles: Rain Coming, Tree Line, How Slow the Wind, Toward the Sea, Archipelago S, All in Twilight, In the Woods, And Then I Knew 'twas Wind |
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'A garden never spurns those who enter it'. 'I can imagine a garden superimposed over the image of an orchestra. A garden is composed of various different elements and sophisticated details that converge to form a harmonious whole. Each element does not exert its individuality, but achieves a state of anonymity - and that is the kind of music that I would like to create.' One of Takemitsu's favourite analogies was to compare composing and listening to music to walking through a formal Japanese garden. Many of his titles refer to gardens: A flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, Spirit Garden, In An Autumn Garden. In his piece for piano and orchestra Arc he paints this picture most vividly: 'The orchestra represents the sand, rocks, trees and grass. The piano assumes the role of the wanderer who walks through the garden in part 1 and returns along the same path in part 2.' |
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Takemitsu wrote the music for 93 Japanese films. He was closely associated with film-makers of the Japanese new wave, and provided the score for such Japanese classics as Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes and Kurosawa's Ran. His film music was as important to him as his concert music, chiefly because of his obsession with the cinema. He was the ultimate film-buff, and boasted that he saw around 300 films a year, his tastes embracing Hollywood blockbusters, westerns, art movies and trash. When visiting a strange country, would often head straight for a cinema as his first port of call, whether or not he understood the language. He drew parallels between music and film, in their manipulation of time, perception and memory. 'I learn a great deal about people through movies...even if I can't understand what they are saying and don't know anything about their culture. By watching them in the movies, I can get a sense of their feelings and their inner lives. I come to understand foreign people in ways that are different from talking to them...it's a musical way of understanding'. |
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Here are two examples of Takemitsu’s music: An Autumn Garden, section V Echo II (traditional Japanese instruments, 1979) Rain Coming for chamber orchestra (1982) |
