The First Dig, Part II

From The Music of Toru Takemitsu, by Peter Burt.
Chapter 2:
--Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on 8 October 1930 (21).
--Joined father to go to Manchuria (to Dalian). Father went because of his employment.
--They enjoyed a privileged lifestyle there, and his father was able to indulge one of his favorite passions more frequently than might otherwise have been possible: the performance of jazz records from his vast personal collection (21).
--His father, Takeo, was also fanatical about playing the shakuhachi (21).
--Takemitsu could still recall such names as "Kid Ory and his Creole Band" from those days, adding that "a little of this jazz music still remains inside me" (21).
--the strongest musical impressions of Takemitsu's earliest years were "Western" in origin (22).
--Takemitsu returned to Tokyo at the age of 7 on account of his father's health. He died in 1938. (Mom, Raiko, was to survive until 1983.) (22)
--Lived with his aunt, a koto teacher. Said: "I heard traditional Japanese music around me all the time. for some reason, it never really appealed to me, never moved me. Later, hearing traditional Japanese music always recalled the bitter memories of the war" (22).
--experiences of the wars years led to "Japanese" music being associated with the dominant culture of militarism (22).
--Occupying US government established a library in Tokyo to which he went "every day to look at scores--all from America, none from Europe." He "knew America first, before I knew anything of Schoenberg or Webern" (23).
--It was listening to Cesar Franck that inspired Takemitsu to become a composer. Not any of the modern composers like those of the Second Viennese School (23).
--In Franck, Takemitsu had "...discovered a second kind of music, namely the instrumental, the absolute kind. In Japan, word and sound cannot be separated" (23).
--Takemitsu's later self-assessment as "almost an autodidact, a self-taught composer" is certainly lent credibility by the fact that he went out in the musical real without any real professional guidance or encouragement of any sort. One should not, however, think that he undertook everything in utter isolation and solitude (23-24).
--Takemitsu became a member of an amateur chorus, and it was through this that he met another young composer: Hiroyoshi Suzuki (1931-). The two were to become something of a comrade-in-arms during those early years of struggle (24).
--wrote music which does not eradicate all evidence of juvenile penatonic-nationalistic sympathies (26).
--Takemitsu once remarked in a film interview that "Japanese people have no sense of Allegro," and while this is not necessarily true of all Japanese music, it certainly reflects the composer's own general predilection for slower tempo categories (28-29).
--This absence of Allegra reflects Takemitsu's own technical awkwardness as he composed at the keyboard in those early years (29).
--there are obvious influences of Debussy and Messiaen. From the very beginning, however, there is something of a profound, dignified melancholy as well (29).
--"This may be a personal feeling," Takemitsu confessed, "but the joy of music, ultimately, seems connected with sadness. The sadness is that of existence. The more you are filled with the pure happiness of music-making, the deeper the sadness is" (29).
--in later years, Takemitsu was to relate specifically to the Japanese aesthetic concept of ma.
--Takemitsu once mistook a piece of his to be one of Messiaen's when playing a CD without liner notes (34).
--formed a personal connection to the Japanese surrealist poet Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-76). He cast a big shadow over the next, second period of Takemitsu's music (38).

From Ch. 3:
--The youthful Jikken Kobo membership embraced a variety of artists in different media, and aimed at an interdisciplinary meeting between them (39).
--This aspect of its activities was to also set an important precedent for Takemitsu, who for the rest of his life was to enjoy close friendships with a number of prominent writers, painters, sculptors and film directors in addition to his musical acquaintances, and whose musical philosophy was to be profoundly influenced by these "synaesthetic" encounters with the other arts (39).
--Takiguchi wrote that the group aimed to "use dance, film 'autoslides' and television in a so-called 'audio visual' synthesis of the arts." "The ultimate aim is that the experimental domain of new art will be infinitely expanded" (40).
--IDS attitude was reflected in the membership (40)
--group introduced a number of relatively "advanced" works by Western composers still unknown to the Japanese public. Things like Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (41).
--it was at this time that Takemitsu first experimented with musique concrete (a style of avant-garde music that relies on recorded sounds, including natural environmental sounds and other noises that are not inherently musical) (41).
--example of which is his Water Music (1960), whose source materials consist entirely of various sounds produced with the aid of the medium which gives the work its title (45).
--used this form of composition in Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan (45).
--period was short lived, but he soon began to write music for radio and theater. Then film (46).
--much of his music for stage, radio (and later, TV)--music which is mostly unknown today, and indeed in many cases may have vanished altogether (47).
--wrote film music from 1956 (to Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit) until the year preceding his death. Adds up to over 90 titles (47).
--Film music--or at least, those portions of it available on disc--often reveals quite different aspects of Takemitsu's creative personality to those found in most of his concert music (47).
--Takemitsu was a highly skilled, professional pastiche artist who can turn his hand to a whole range of stylistic codes, each of which is perfectly adapted for the scenario in question. For example, in Jose Torres (1959), about the Puerto Rican boxer, his music simulates an appropriately "Latin" style (47).
--Many of the musical codes which Takemitsu employs to the ends are obviously decidedly "populist" and tonal in character, and as such constitute an area of musical activity radically divergent fro mthe modernist preoccupations of his contemporaneous concert scores (47).
--He decided to largely finance his career as a composer largely by these means of activity. It also allowed him to eschew the form of remuneration which became the staple of many of his Western colleagues--teaching in higher education (47).
--Among the many other attractions it afforded, one was certainly that it offered him temporary release from the restrictive solitude of his composing studio into a world peopled by other creative spirits--functioning as what he described as a "liberty passport" (48).
--the film scores seem a sort of sketch-pad for concert music, a place where he could experiment with new ideas and work out musical problems before incorporating them into a work of abstract music for the concert stage (48).
--he often directly quoted from his film scores in his concert music. Often reworked the same materials. Film music, on the whole, offered Takemitsu the opportunity to experiment freely with timbral, notational and even--as has been suggested--stylistic devices which might later find their way into his concert work (48).
--such well-known works as Requiem for Strings and The Dorian Horizon draw their materials, in part from, respectively, music for stage and screen.

That's all for now. I'm too tired to type anymore. One thing that occurred to me when I was reading about Takemitsu that I'd like to remember/pursue further in my research is this: the idea that Takemitsu wrote in a language that was neither Eastern nor Western--it was somewhere in the middle. This has been said of Abe's writing and Teshigahara's adaptation of Woman in the Dunes, too, not to mention any of Teshigahara's artistic endeavors after the early '70s. There's mos def a connection here.