Diggin' in fo Some Mo

Hello again. It's been way too long since I've sat down to do some intensive stuffs for this project. That is about to change.
I'm going to continue with The Music of Toru Takemitsu, as I really need to get through this book. It's due so soon!
Chapter 4:
--He worked on his Requiem very slowly, sometimes managing to complete only a single bar, or even half a bar, during the course of a day (50).
--During the 1950s, he began to work on projects that were more ambitious and prestigious than the modest chamber productions of Jikken Kobo (58).
--Got into serialism and other modern Western forms through Jikken Kobo's pioneer performances of such works as Schoenberg's circle. It was Webern in particular who influenced Takemitsu. (Discuss.) (60)
--By the end of the 1950s, he was-like all good avant-garde composers of his day--"enslaved" by the music of the Austrian master (60).
--Stravinsky and Takemitsu. Stravinsky did much to promote Takemitsu's reputation to both the Japanese as well as to the West. In 1959 he visited Japan and asked the NHK to play him some recordings of new Japanese music. There had been no plan to have anything by Takemitsu amongst the works selected, but by accident someone appears to have begun playing a recording of the Requiem and--although the organizers were for stopping it--Stravinsky asked to hear the work until its end. Later, if asked if he thought any of the works were any good, Stravinsky mentioned only Takemitsu's name, commenting on the "sincerity" and "strictness" of his music, and apparently expressing his astonishment that "music as passionate as this should be created by a man of such short stature" (71).
--To a certain extent, the whole Stravinsky incident reveals a gap between domestic and Western perceptions of Takemitsu's status that was to remain with the composer throughout his life, and indeed continues to persist after his death (71).
--The models for his "first period" works are predominately European and American composers of an older generation--Messiaen and Debussy, Webern and Berg, initially flavored a little by the "nationalist" school to which Takemitsu's teacher Kiyose belonged (72).
--The "second period" is the era of modernist experimentation (72).
--In this period, he became influenced by cage and the American experimental school, as well as--most famously of all--a renewed interest in his own traditional and other "Oriental" musics (72).
Chapter 5 Projections on to a Western Mirror:
--In his famous 1974 essay "Mirror of Tree, Mirror of Grass," Takemitsu compares Western music, with its emphasis on the individual, to the tree, and contrasts this with non-Western musics which have "grown like grass" (73).
--"Once, I believed that to make music was to project myself on to an enormous mirror that was called the West" (73).
--His style was enriched by encounters with the burgeoning Western avant-garde of the 1960s (73).
--Many of his modes of adapting Eastern musical practices for a Western context would not have been possible, in fact, without this exposure to the new technical resources being developed in the West (73).
--...the composer's interest in the tone-quality of individual sound-events (74).
--Takemitsu's keen ear for timbral subtleties had been evident from the very earliest phase of his career, but from around the beginning of the 1960s onwards his ability to conjure a wealth of differentiated sonorities entered on a new phase of refinement (74).
--Pieces by Josquin des Pres and Eustache du Caurroy (1549-1609) found their way, in period arrangements, into the score for the film Rikyu (85).
--Indebted to the American jazz composer George Russel (b.1923) as well (86).
--The Dorian Horizon, a piece of concert music, was based largely on material he had written for Woman in the Dunes two years previously (88).
--The eerie close-ups of sliding sands in the film have their musical analogue in the high clusters of glissandi over slow-moving, chromatic ostinati for the double basses, or the strange, "Bartokian night music" with its weirdly chromatic slidings (88-89).
Chapter 6:
--It was in 1961 that Takemitsu's most intense involvement with the theories of Cage begins (92).
--He only experimented with Cage's techniques directly for a couple of years (95).
--Cage's philosophy of silence affords close parallels with both Takemitsu's own ideas about the "stream of sound" and the traditional concept of ma, and his interest in the individualized sound-phenomenon accords well with the concept of sawari which Takemitsu was to make very much his own (96).
--That there should be this affinity between Cage's own and traditional "Eastern" ideas is perhaps hardly surprising, for Cage--as is well known, and as Takemitsu himself readily acknowledged--was himself "influenced through Zen through his encounters with the Zen master Daisetzu Suzuki" (96).
--...that "feedback loop" whereby "Eastern" ideas are reimported from the West to their point of origin, as had happened half a century earlier with Debussy's music (96).
--"A true artist is a person who, descending to the bottom of his inner mineshaft, reveals his own self like a piece of unrefined ore...music is song and song is love" (97).
--Here Takemitsu compares composition explicitly to a natural, spontaneous emotional self-expression (97).
--...a "Lento composer whose tendency towards a rather melancholy "expressionism".... This is in direct opposition to Cage's philosophy of non-intentionality, to his belief that tones should simply be themselves, not vehicles for personal theories or human emotions. In this respect, Takemitsu's musical thinking differs profoundly from Cage's; and it may be for this reason that Takemitsu ultimately never became the "experimental" composer that his explorations of the 1960s might have led one to expect, but rather ended his days producing music whose highly personal emotional tone was to be far removed from the "Zen-like" absence of intention in these early graphic experiments (97).
--Continued to be enslaved by Webern (98).
--More influences: Messiaen's modal system, aleatoric writing, and Cage-inspired graphic notations (102).
--For--as the composer made explicit in his commentaries on this work--various aspects of its formal patterning are modeled on the layout of a traditional Japanese garden. This was, indeed, a source of inspiration to which Takemitsu was to turn repeatedly in his search for specific formal organizations; but it was also one which he was to interpret in different senses as the years passed. In the present instance, for example, he envisages the solo pianist as an individual "taking a stroll" through a garden represented by the orchestra, and even apparently incorporates into his writing some of the mannerisms of gait of the particular performer for whom the work was written (103).