Tōru Takemitsu

Japanese classical and film-score composer

• Born: October 8, 1930
• Birthplace: Tokyo, Japan
• Died: February 20, 1996
• Place of death: Tojyo, Japan

Takemitsu, one of Japan’s leading classical composers, joined Western and Japanese musical traditions, with instruments from both. His impressive film scores helped popularize the works of premier directors such as Akira Kurosawa.

The Life

Tōru Takemitsu (toh-roo tah-keh-mee-tsoo) was born on October 8, 1930, in Tokyo, son of the government official Takeo Takemitsu and his wife Reiko. In November his father was posted to the city of Dairen in Manchuria and took his family with him. Takemitsu moved back to Tokyo in 1937 to attend Fujimae Elementary School. When his father died in 1938, Takemitsu was raised by his mother and an aunt who taught the koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument.

Soon after enrolling in Keika Middle School, Takemitsu was drafted in late 1944 to help build fortifications. His squad leader secretly played for the boys the French chanson “Parlez-moi d’amour” (speak to me about love), composed by Jean Lenoir and sung by Lucienne Boyer. The song awakened Takemitsu’s love of Western music.

After the end of World War II in 1945, Takemitsu ardently listened to the American Forces Network. While working as a waiter in an American post exchange in Tokyo from 1946 to 1947, Takemitsu enjoyed further exposure to popular American and Western European music.

While struggling as a self-taught composer and cofounding Jikken K b (experimental laboratory) to promote new Western-based, antinationalistic music, Takemitsu met and fell in love with Asaka Wakayama, an actress of the Shiki Theater Group. He was hospitalized with tuberculosis from June, 1953, to March, 1954, and on June 15, 1954, married Wakayama. One wedding gift was a piano from the nationalist composer Toshiro Mayazumi, with whom Takemitsu formed a lifelong friendship despite their opposing political views. Beginning in 1955 Takemitsu’s film scores were used for Japanese movies.

Hospitalized again in January, 1957, Takemitsu composed Requiem, which brought him international recognition when Igor Stravinsky listened to it and praised it in 1959. On December 16, 1961, Takemitsu’s daughter Maki was born.

An October, 1962, meeting with American composer John Cage in Tokyo persuaded Takemitsu to fuse Western with Japanese music. His breakthrough came with the commission of November Steps for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1967. In the 1970’s Takemitsu’s compositions increasingly integrated Japanese and Western musical elements in works with a garden theme.

At the same time Takemitsu flourished as a composer of film music. Of his ninety-three scores, the sound tracks for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and the Hollywood blockbuster Rising Sun were especially successful.

At the height of his creative work in 1995, Takemitsu was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. His final collection of essays, Toki no entai (1995; the gardener of time), appeared in October, 1995. He died on February 20, 1996.

The Music

Takemitsu began composing at seventeen, striving to create works in the style of the Western music he enjoyed. He never received much formal musical training but followed his own inspiration. He joined an amateur choir, where Hiroyoshi Suzuki introduced him to composing.

Takemitsu destroyed his first composition, “Kakehi” (1947), after learning that it sounded Japanese. After some training with composer Yasuji Kiyose from 1948 to 1950, Takemitsu publicly performed his first composition, the piano piece “Lento in Due Movimenti,” on December 7, 1950.

Takemitsu’s early works were based on his admiration of popular American composers such as Aaron Copland, French Romantics such as Claude Debussy, the Austrian innovators Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern and, most of all, French composer Olivier Messiaen. However, it was only his third work, Distance de fée (1951), for violin and piano, that met with his and the critics’ approval.

In late 1955 Takemitsu turned briefly to the French avant-garde style of musique concrète, based on everyday sounds and noises. His four-minute “Vocalism A.I.” (1956) played on the Japanese word ai (love) and featured sounds by a male and a female singer. Takemitsu next started to compose movie scores, and his music for Kurutta kajitsu was the third of his ninety-three film scores.

Requiem. While seriously ill in 1957, Takemitsu composed this work for strings for the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. He declared that Requiem was intended to mourn his friend Fumio Hayasaka who died in 1955, although the work carries strong intimations of Takemitsu’s own near-death experience.

Formally, Requiem represents Takemitsu’s break with the musique concrète of the French avant-garde. Exuding a somber tone throughout, Requiem introduces its melody with a sudden pitch out of silence. Its slow tempi are designed to convey a mood of pulsating ripples, like those created by raindrops falling on water. Even though Takemitsu argued that his work has no real end or beginning, inspired by a random Tokyo subway ride, critics discerned a three-part aba structure. Characteristic of his work to come, silence plays an important part in the melodic contour of the composition.

Requiem led to Takemitsu’s international discovery. Stravinsky heard it while visiting Japan in 1959 and praised its composer, whom he met for lunch. Suddenly, Takemitsu became known outside Japan.

November Steps. Takemitsu was commissioned to compose this work for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1967. It was influenced by the work of his composer friend Cage, whom he first met in Tokyo in 1962 and again when Takemitsu was invited to the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 1964. Widely disseminated and listened to, it would become Takemitsu’s most popular work in the West. In November Steps Takemitsu chose to juxtapose biwa (Japanese lute) and shakuhachi (Japanese flute) solos with music from a full Western orchestra. At the New York City performance directed by Takemitsu’s friend Seiji Ozawa, the biwa and shakuhachi soloists were seated in front of an evenly divided section of Western string and percussion instruments, with wind instruments forming a bloc at the rear. Throughout November Steps, each instrument maintained its own identity, and there was not so much a fusion but rather a juxtaposition of distinct sounds united by a certain harmony. Overall, the work expressed Takemitsu’s emerging trademark of sonority.

The title November Steps is derived from Takemitsu’s play on the Japanese musical term danmono (matters of steps). In music, this means “variations on a theme,” with dan standing for steps or variations. As his composition offers eleven variations on a theme, Takemitsu took the eleventh month of the year to indicate this. Critics enthusiastically welcomed the work.

Garden Cycle of the 1970’s. For Takemitsu, Japanese gardens were free from the militaristic connotations that fueled his early rejection of Japanese music. When he accepted a commission to compose a new work for the Imperial Household’s gagaku ensemble of traditional Japanese instruments, Takemitsu chose the theme of a garden. In an Autumn Garden was performed on October 30, 1973. It consists of a single movement with the komabue (small transverse bamboo flute) prominently interjecting birdlike sounds piercing Takemitsu’s trademark moments of silence.

Encouraged by his success, Takemitsu composed another work centered on the motif of the garden, but this time for Western brass instruments. Garden Rain (1974) introduces the theme of water that would characterize many of Takemitsu’s later works. In a genuine fusion of Japanese and Western music, Takemitsu composed the substantial brass chords of Garden Rain according to the rules for the shō, the mouth organ of the gagaku ensemble. The resulting long duration of the notes and the sonorous, low-pitched timbre of his piece create a unique sonic quality typical of Takemitsu’s mature oeuvre.

Takemitsu’s orchestral A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden fully fuses Japanese and Western instruments with a canny appreciation of moments of silence. Here, the garden is visited by a black bird, played with notes on the pentatonic scale indicated by the black keys of the piano, and a flock of white birds, played on the piano’s white keys. Takemitsu completed his garden cycle of compositions with a revised version, In the Autumn Garden—Complete Version, that expanded his original composition by five additional movements. It premiered on September 28, 1979. His original piece appears after the movements of “Strophe,” “Echo I,” and “Melisma” and is followed by “Echo II” and “Antistrophe.” The complete version of Shuteika is one of Takemitsu’s most complex creations, characterized by symmetry, repetition, and recollection of a central theme. Some critics view it as his most outstanding work.

Ran. Takemitsu’s lifelong interest in creating film music reached a creative, internationally recognized climax in his score for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985). The movie is a masterful adaptation of William Shakespeare’s King Lear set in medieval Japan. For Ran, Takemitsu proved equally adept at scoring the early formal meetings of the lord and his retainers as well as the chaos of the betrayed lord’s ramblings on a stormy heath. What critics have called “strings that chirp like insects” accompany the evil daughters’ scheming, and Takemitsu’s trademark haunting, deep-pitched chords intensify the film’s climax.

Musical Legacy

Takemitsu has become recognized as one of the outstanding Japanese composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His November Steps was hailed in the West as a fusion of Eastern and Western music, even though the different instruments coexist rather than blend. Once Takemitsu abandoned his initial rejection of Japanese music, his garden cycle compositions of the 1970’s were pieces of genius and innovation.

Takemitsu’s mature compositions brought traditional Japanese music played on the biwa, shakuhachi, and shō into equal interplay with Western instruments and modes of contemporary composition. His middle and final works created world music with its own style and character.

Throughout his musical career, Takemitsu combined the popular and the artistic. His film scores helped win Japanese cinema a large international audience. He did not look down on occasional music but gave it his creative best. For his compositions Takemitsu was honored with many international and Japanese prizes and memberships in foreign academies. He received the Prix Italia in 1958, Japan’s Otaka Prize in 1976 and 1981, the Grawemeyer Award in 1994, and the Glenn Gould Award posthumously in 1996. Takemitsu was made a member of the Akademie der Künste of the former East Germany (1979), the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1985), and, in France, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985) and the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1986). Takemitsu won the Film Award of the Japanese Academy four times, and, with Ran, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Score in 1987.

Principal Works

chamber works:Distance de fée, 1951; Shitsunai kyosokyoku, 1955 (Chamber Concerto); Arc, 1962 (for strings); Garden Rain, 1974; Shuteika—Ichigu, 1979 (In the Autumn Garden—Complete Version); A Way a Lone, 1981 (for string quartet); A Way a Lone II, 1981 (for string orchestra); Ame zo furu, 1982 (Rain Coming); Tree Line, 1988.

film scores:Kurutta kajitsu (1956; crazy fruit); José Torres, 1960; Kwaidan, 1964; Suna no onna, 1964 (Woman in the Dunes); José Torres, Part II, 1965; Tanin no kao, 1966 (The Face of Another); Dodesukaden, 1970; Chinmoku, 1971 (Silence); Kaseki no mori, 1973 (The Petrified Forest); Kaseki, 1975; Ai no borei, 1978; Ran, 1985; Kuroi ame, 1989 (Black Rain); Rikyu, 1989; Rising Sun, 1993.

orchestral works:Saegirarenai kyusoku, 1952 (Uninterrupted Rests); Requiem, 1957 (for string orchestra); Solitude sonore, 1958; Ki no kyoku, 1961 (Tree Music); Pianisuto no tame no corona, 1962 (Corona for Pianist[s]); Piano Distance, 1961; Kaze no uma, 1962 (Horse in the Wind); Arc Parts I and II, 1966 (for piano and orchestra); Chiheisen no doria, 1966 (Dorian Horizon; for string orchestra); Asterism, 1967 (for piano and orchestra); Green, 1967 (November Steps); Shiki, 1970 (Seasons); Cassiopeia, 1971; Eucalypts II, 1971; Fuyu, 1971 (Winter); Munari by Munari, 1972; Aki, 1973 (Autumn); Shuteika, 1973 (In an Autumn Garden); Gitimalya, 1974; Quatrain, 1975; Marginalia, 1976; Quatrain II, 1977; Tori wa hoshigata no niwa ni oriru, 1977 (A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden); Umi e, 1981 (Toward the Sea); Yume mado, 1985 (Dream/Window); Gémeaux, 1986; Twill by Twilight: In Memory of Morton Feldman, 1988; Mystère, les yeux clos, 1990 (Visions); How Slow the Wind, 1991; Gunto S., 1993 (Archipelago S.; for twenty-one players).

vocal works:Kansho, 1962 (Coral Island; for soprano and orchestra); Stanza I, 1969 (for female voice and ensemble); Stanza II, 1971 (for voice and flute).

writings of interest: Oto, chinmoku to hakariaeru hodoni, 1971 (Confronting Silence: Selected Writings, 1995); Ongaku no yohaku hara, 1980; Yume no inyo, 1984 (Quotation of Dream, 1998); Ongaku o yobisamasu mono, 1985; Yume to kazu, 1987; Opera o tsukuru, 1990; Oto-kotoba-ningen, 1992; Tooi yobigoe no kanatae, 1992;Toki no entai, 1996 (the gardener of time).

Bibliography

Burt, Peter. The Music of Tōru Takemitsu. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Thorough discussion of Takemitsu’s career as a composer; placing him in the context of his times. Somewhat brief on Takemitsu’s film scores; detailed analysis of brief examples taken from Takemitsu’s work. Comprehensive list of Takemitsu’s works; bibliography, index.

Cornwell, Lewis. “Tōru Takemitsu’s November Steps.” Journal of New Music Research 31, no. 3 (September, 2002): 211. Review of Takemitsu’s early masterpiece combining two traditional Japanese instruments and a Western-style orchestra.

Ohtake, Noriko. Creative Sources for the Music of Tōru Takemitsu. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Scolar Press, 1993. Presentation of Takemitsu’s sources and some analysis of his view on the subject. Finds Takemitsu was influenced by both Western and Japanese music and successfully joined both in a creative achievement. Bibliography, index.

Ross, Alex. “Toward Silence: The Intense Repose of Tōru Takemitsu.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2007. Review of posthumous performances of Takemitsu’s works in the United States in 2006 and 2007. Overall reflection on the effect of Takemitsu’s use of silence.

Siddons, James. Tōru Takemitsu: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Comprehensive, detailed biography of Takemitsu. Excellent analysis of his major concert pieces organized according to genre, instrument, musical theme. Complete list of Takemitsu’s compositions, including film scores. Discography, bibliography that includes English reviews of Takemitsu’s works and secondary sources in English. Accessible starting point for analysis of the composer’s life and work.

Takemitsu, Tōru. Confronting Silence: Selected Writings. Translated and edited by Yoshiko Kakudo and Glenn Glasow. Berkeley, Calif.: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995. Careful selection of substantial essays by Takemitsu written from 1960 to 1993. Enables English readers to learn Takemitsu’s personal understanding of his work, his underlying issues and principles, his method and approach to composition, and about fellow composers Takemitsu credits with influencing his work. Illustrated, index.

Tōru Takemitsu Memorial Edition. Contemporary Music Review 21 (December, 2002). Journal issue dedicated to articles by noted scholars on the work of Takemitsu. Articles highlight Takemitsu’s personality and his work and offer detailed analysis of his key compositions.