Buried Alive

From The Music of Toru Takemitsu
Chapter 7 Projections on to an Eastern Mirror:
--Of all the effects the encounter with Cage had upon Takemitsu's musical thinking, perhaps the most significant was that of reconciling him at last to his own native musical tradtion. As has been shown, Takemitsu claimed that at the outset he had "struggled to avoid being 'Japanese,' to avoid 'Japanese' qualities"; now, however, "largely through my contact with John Cage" he was able "to recognize the value of my own tradition" (110).
--It was incidental music that provided the laboratory for Takemitsu's first experiments with Japanese traditional instruments (110).
--Unfortunately, this has perhaps also had the deleterious effect of creating the impression that the composer's career was dominated by the attempt to create some sort of "bridge" between traditional Japanese instrumental praxis and Western symphonic music (111).
--In reality, however, there are relatively few of his works that employ traditional Japanese instruments (111).
--Takemitsu finally concluded that "it made no sense to unite Japanese music with European" (111).
--Japanese music continued to exert a profound influence on the composer's thinking throughout the remainder of his creative life (111).
--He was still strongly influenced by the aesthetics of traditional Japanese music (111).
--Takemitsu was eventually to achieve the most successful integration of "Eastern" and "Western" elements of any Japanese composer to date (112).
--first work to do this: Eclipse for biwa and shakuhachi (1966) (112).
--About November Steps: "In Japanese music, danmono are the equivalent of Western variations, and the word dan means "step." My 'November Steps' are a set of eleven variations" 114).
--"Not blending the instruments, but integrating them" (126).
--While Takemitsu tended to think he was working towards a sort of cultural cosmopolitanism through his composition, there is repeated evidence in his writings that--despite such "advanced" ideas--he still unconsciously thought in terms of the old binary opposition of "Japan" and "other" to which his nationalist colleagues had adhered. Rather than recognizing any common ground between Japanese and other Asiatic musics, he found the latter as alien to his own sensibility as Western music, and as a result, the music of other Asian traditions was to exercise almost no influence on his ideas at either a musical or philosophical level (128).
Chapter 8:
--By 1970, the perception of Takemitsu as member of the international avant-garde had become sufficiently well established to receive the most elegant of symbolic confirmations (132).
--He was known to have revered Bach's St. Matthew Passion (153).
Chapter 9:
--The simplified style which characterized this new, "third period" in Takemitsu's creative output was no adventitious development, but one whose roots can e traced in his work from the preceding years (160).
--A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977). This is when Takemitsu first gives clear and unambiguous expression to the new stylistic preoccupations with which he is henceforth to be concerned (160).
--...it is the overall form of the music that is modeled on a Japanese garden: the metaphor is now related to the horizontal aspect of the music, the actual contents of the piece as it unfolds in time, of which the term "structure" is descriptive (168).
--...the garden analogy operated largely by virtue of the vertical aspect of the music, in terms of Takemitsu's "pan-focal," stratified treatment of the orchestra (168).
Chapter 10:
--After A Flock Descends, however, there was to be no turning back to the "modernist" style with which Takemitsu had been preoccupied in the earlier part of the decade (175).
--He confessed to being a "Romantic" (176).
--Compared his works to rain: "It was the composer's intention to create a series of works, which like their subject, pass through various metamorphoses, culminating in a sea of tonality" (176).
Chapter 11:
--By the year of his sixtieth b-day, 1990, Takemitsu's reputation as the senior Japanese composer of his generation had become an established feature of the international music scene (216).
--From the perspective of Western reception, in fact, it now rather seemed as if contemporary Japanese music were Toru Takemitsu (216).
--1995 he collapsed and were admitted to a hospital (216).
--Even here, deprived of the opportunity for any of other kind of work, he methodically kept a diary and devised a fantasy cookbook of outlandish recipes, charmingly illustrated with meticulous pencil sketches, both of which have recently been published in Japan (216).
--...listening in his final hours, by some uncanny synchronistic coincidence, to a radio broadcast of the Bach work he loved above all others: the St. Matthew Passion (216).
--Working on an opera at the time of his death. Libretto was to be written by the American "beat generation" writer Bary Gifford (216).
--...it might be legitimate to speak of a specific "late style" in which Takemitsu gives full rein to the "Romanticism" towards which his music had been tending for over a decade (217).
--...the garden, he claimed in a film interview towards the end of his life, does not reject things from outside itself, and Takemtisu's musical "gardens" are able to accommodate "things outside themselves" too: fragments of other pieces by Takemitsu, even fragments of pieces by other composers (220).