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Takemitsu, Toru

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Toru Takemitsu (/people/literature-and-

arts/music-history-composers-and-performers-
biographies/toru-takemitsu)
Widely considered modern Japan's greatest composer in the classical music tradition, Toru Takemitsu
(/people/literature-and-arts/music-history-composers-and-performers-biographies/toru-takemitsu) (1930–
1996) merged Japanese and Western instruments and techniques in his music. Equally important,
perhaps, was the way he humanized some of the intellectual devices used by contemporary classical
composers of the West, not diluting their rigor but attaching them to concrete images rooted in nature
and in Japanese aesthetics.
Growing up amid the destruction of World War II (/history/modern-europe/wars-and-battles/world-war-ii),
Takemitsu learned to despise the culture of his native country. Almost completely self-taught as a
composer, he immersed himself in Western techniques, returning to Japanese music only later, at the
suggestion of an American associate. Takemitsu's music is sensuous and accessible, and he was an
acclaimed and enthusiastic composer of lm music, the classical genre most oriented toward mass
appeal. The detail and density of his music also drew the admiration of specialists, including many of his
fellow composers. Some of his music involved tonal depictions of Japanese gardens, and he often
acknowledged the garden as a source of inspiration. "I can imagine a garden superimposed over the
image of an orchestra," Takemitsu was quoted as saying on England's Soundintermedia website. "A garden
is composed of various di erent elements and sophisticated details that converge to form a harmonious
whole."
Drafted Into Labor Gang
Born October 8, 1930, in Tokyo, Japan, Takemitsu spent his early life in China with his family. By the time
he was brought back to Japan to attend school in 1938, Japanese militarism was on the rise and Western
music and lms were mostly forbidden. Takemitsu kept up a secret fascination with the West. After war
broke out he saw a newsreel lm of a British destroyer, the Prince of Wales (/people/history/british-and-
irish-history-biographies/prince-wales), being sunk by a Japanese attack, but felt only awe at the
sophistication of the British ship. In 1944, at 14, Takemitsu was drafted and put to work in a labor gang
assigned to build a Japanese army camp. While he was working, an o cer played a recording of the
French popular song "Parlez-moi d'amour" (Speak to Me of Love, 1930). "I did not know there was such
beautiful music in the world," Takemitsu later recalled, according to the Economist.
After the war Takemitsu tuned into the American Armed Forces Radio, hearing a broad mix of music,
including popular songs, Western classical music, and jazz. In the last of these categories, it was
bandleader and composer Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, with his range of instrumental e ects,
whom he especially admired. By the time he was 16, Takemitsu had decided he wanted to be a composer.
He studied brie y with composer Yasuji Kiyose beginning in 1948, but mostly he learned musical
composition on his own. "My teachers," he was quoted as saying by Soundintermedia, "are Duke Ellington
(/people/literature-and-arts/music-popular-and-jazz-biographies/duke-ellington) and nature." He also
admired the quiet, subtly colored impressionist music of French composer Claude Debussy.
In poor health due to lung ailments, Takemitsu turned for moral support to his girlfriend, Asaka, who
later became his wife and the mother of his daughter Maki. "He had holes in his lungs" when the two rst
met, Asaka told Kevin Jackson of the London Independent, "and his father had died early, so his mother
had to go out to work, but in spite of their nancial di culties he really wanted to study music. When I
met him, he almost forced me into taking care of him; he needed to be taken care of."
Takemitsu quickly absorbed the latest developments in Western music, proceeding from Debussy to the
contemporary French music of Olivier Messiaen (/people/literature-and-arts/music-history-composers-
and-performers-biographies/olivier-messiaen). His rst work to be publicly performed, the Lento in Two
Movements, was in uenced by Messiaen but had Takemitsu's own distinctive style, which would remain
recognizable even as he adopted various new Western techniques. His music was often quiet, with small,
sudden climaxes rather than a strong feeling of movement toward a goal, and with a strong focus on

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timbre (the "color" of a sound"), texture, and register (the highness or lowness of a pitch). There was
something Japanese about Takemitsu's music, even during the years when he would have been reluctant
to admit such a thing.
Wrote Electronic Piece
During the s Takemitsu kept up with new Western styles, mastered them quickly, and gained wider
recognition. He studied the serialist music of Austrian composers Arnold Schoenberg (/people/literature-
and-arts/music-history-composers-and-performers-biographies/arnold-schoenberg) and Anton Webern,
which rejected the idea of key and instead derived the pitch material of a piece of music from a small cell
or sequence of notes announced at the beginning of the work. Electronic music, made on a large
computer apparatus prior to the invention of the synthesizer, was on the rise, and Takemitsu's 1956 piece
Vocalism A.I., which manipulated recordings of actors speaking those vowel sounds, was one of Japan's
rst electronic compositions. Takemitsu's reputation grew when Russian-American composer Igor
Stravinsky, visiting Japan, heard Takemitsu's Requiem for strings (1957) and praised it.
In the early s Takemitsu began to travel to the West for performances of his works. In Hawaii he met
experimentalist composer John Cage (/people/literature-and-arts/music-history-composers-and-
performers-biographies/john-cage), whose works often involved leaving portions of his compositions to
chance in one way or another, and the two became friends. Takemitsu had already experimented with
chance procedures in such works as Corona for one or more pianists, 1962, whose score resembled a
diagram rather than conventional music notation. Cage, an adherent of Zen Buddhism (/philosophy-and-
religion/eastern-religions/buddhism/zen-buddhism), encouraged Takemitsu to reconnect with his
Japanese roots, and Takemitsu began to think about the power of ritualistic Japanese art (/literature-and-
arts/art-and-architecture/asian-and-middle-eastern-art/japanese-art) forms such as puppet theater. At the
same time, he was becoming disillusioned with the hard-core intellectualism of serialist composers and
more and more interested in nature as a source of inspiration. Takemitsu's Coral Island (1962) won
recognition in the West.
His real breakthrough, however, was November Steps, commissioned by the New York (/places/united-
states-and-canada/us-political-geography/new-york) Philharmonic Orchestra in 1967 and conducted in its
premiere by Seiji Ozawa (/people/literature-and-arts/music-history-composers-and-performers-
biographies/seiji-ozawa), a close friend of Takemitsu. One of Takemitsu's rst works to use Japanese
traditional instruments, it was a concerto for solo biwa (a scraped and plucked Japanese lute) and
shakuhachi (a Japanese ute), with Western orchestra. Barry Conyngham and Roger Woodward wrote in
the London Guardian that "the music has an almost overpowering focus, as if—in trying to make the two
musics one, in striving to accommodate the two rich worlds—the composer draws himself and us into a
strange new state." Other major orchestras performed and recorded the work, and by around 1970
Takemitsu was a well-known name in classical music circles, invited to compose music for ensembles
and festivals around the world.
Takemitsu's fascination with gardens came to the fore in his music of the s and s, in such works
as Garden Rain (1974) for brass ensemble. He likened the intended experience of hearing his music to
walking through a garden; the scenery changes as the listener moves through time, but there is no clear
starting or end point. One of Takemitsu's best-known works remains the orchestral A Flock Descends into
the Pentagonal Garden (1977). The piece mixes Japanese and Western techniques at a deep level, with a
vivid evocation of the title scene (a solo oboe represents the descending birds) concealing a densely
mathematical exploitation of permutations of the number ve, based on the use of a pentatonic ( ve-
tone) scale, in the shifting orchestral elds representing the shape of the garden.
Takemitsu's Waterways for piano and orchestra (1975) was inspired by the garden at Spain's Alhambra
fortress. At rst he was unmoved. "Since music is for me not symmetrical, I did not like the regularity of
the garden at all," he was quoted as saying by Paula Deitz in the New York (/places/united-states-and-
canada/us-political-geography/new-york) Times. But then a woman walked through the garden, breaking
the symmetry of the scene and disturbing the water on a pond. "Only then, the music came," Takemitsu
said.
Composed Film Scores
Despite the cutting-edge qualities of his concert music, Takemitsu never lost his appreciation for the
popular songs that had originally inspired him. He was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of
Western pop music. Takemitsu found a meeting place between pop and classical music in his 93 scores
for Japanese lms, which he wrote with enthusiasm over the last three decades of his life and which
covered all genres from sophisticated art-house lms to thrillers. Takemitsu's lm career began with the
1964 art lm Woman in the Dunes and included scores for such classics as director Akira Kurosawa
(/people/literature-and-arts/ lm-and-television-biographies/akira-kurosawa)'s Ran, a lm based on
Shakespeare's King Lear (/literature-and-arts/literature-english/english-literature- - /king-lear). His
lm scores varied according to the nature of the project; the Woman in the Dunes score was a sparse,

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minimal a air that would not have sounded out of place on a program of his concert music, while other
scores were overtly emotional in the Western fashion. Takemitsu viewed some 200 lms a year, and one
of his favorite activities on arriving in a new city during his world travels was to head for a movie theater,
whether he spoke the local language or not. In 1993 he wrote the score for the American lm Rising Sun.
Takemitsu's lm scores represent an under-investigated aspect of his total output.
Takemitsu's genial personality won him friends as well as admirers. In person he was more boisterous
than his calm music might suggest. Pointing to a picture of a spiritual-looking Takemitsu on a printed
concert program, his daughter Maki told Jackson that "he certainly wasn't like that. He loved to play the
Beatles or jazz on the piano; he loved to dance around and play, he loved socializing and drinking with
other people, especially writers and painters and younger musicians . He was really a lot of fun."
Takemitsu had many friends at the top levels of Japanese literature (/literature-and-arts/literature-other-
modern-languages/asian-literature/japanese-literature) and arts, including novelist Kenzaburo Oe and
poet Shuntaro Tanikawa. His sense of humor was legendary. In broken English, he once told an
interviewer that he thought silence was the mother of music. Then he backed o and corrected himself,
saying that perhaps it was only the grandmother.
One of Takemitsu's major compositions of the s, In an Autumn Garden (1979), was written entirely for
the traditional gagaku Japanese court musical ensemble, but in the last two decades of his life he more
often wrote for Western instruments. His music was often gentle in spirit, and he continued to re ne his
instrumental textures in the direction of greater and greater distinctiveness and clarity. Takemitsu's music
continued to be frequently performed in the s. His Fantasma/Cantos (1991) was awarded the 1994
Grawemeyer Prize, one of the classical music world's most prestigious honors and one that carried a
$150,000 stipend. Little of his music to that point had been for voices, and he set to work on an opera,
with a libretto by California novelist Barry Gi ord. He was su ering from cancer, however, and he died in
Tokyo on February 20, 1996.
Books
Contemporary Musicians, vol. 6, Gale, 1991.
Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, nd ed., Macmillan, 2001.
Periodicals
Daily News (Los Angeles (/places/united-states-and-canada/us-political-geography/los-angeles)), May 8,
2002.
Economist, March 2, 1996.
Guardian (London, England), February 22, 1996; August 29, 1997.
Independent (London, England), October 1, 1998.
New York Times, February 21, 1996; March 3, 1996.
San Francisco (/places/united-states-and-canada/us-political-geography/san-francisco) Chronicle,
February 21, 1996.
Times (London, England), February 22, 1996.
Online
"Who Was Toru Takemitsu?," http://www.soundintermedia.co.uk/treeline-online/biog.html (February 2,
2006).
Encyclopedia of World Biography

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