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).
Monday, October 20, 2008
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).
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).
Saturday, October 11, 2008
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.
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.
The First Dig
I've been busy for the past month or so reading books, articles, reviews, etc. on my boyz (Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu). I've found some great stuff, and I think I've just about found everything I'll need to start writing. Well, maybe. I'm fairly intimidated by the idea of this paper, as it's inevitably going to be big and sprawling. One thing's fo sho: I've never written a paper of this size. I hope this blog will help me organize my research; after all, it's focus that I need. Feel free to make any comments about, well, anything.
Here we go.
Even though I've got several books to work with, today I'll be focusing on one: The Music of Toru Takemitsu, by Peter Burt. This book is crucial to my paper. Also, it's from a school outside of our liberry network, so I've gotta get crackin'--I'm not gonna have no late fines with this guy.
Notes on The Music of Toru Takemitsu:
Intro:
--In addition to being a composer, Takemitsu was a festival organizer, writer on aesthetics, author of detective novels, celebrity chef on Japanese TV (pg. 1)
--wrote music for concert hall, film, theater, TV and radio (1)
--book focuses on only a small area of Takemitsu's versatile creativity (1)
--composer's career falls into three "periods"; the transition from "second" to "third" was so dramatic that it has been hard for commentators to miss it (1).
--Yoko Narazaki speaks of a "change from an 'avant-garde' to a 'conservative' style" around the end of the 1970s (1)
--Burt feels that there is a second, if less spectacular distinction to be made b/w the first and second periods. This is clear from the differences in the juvenelia from the first decade of his composing career (the 1950s onwards), and the works which succeeded them from around the turn of the 1960s (2)
--in the early works, Takemitsu's style showed very clear influences from American and European composers--these influences are much more pronounced in this period (2).
--influenced by John Cage, and through him, was influenced by traditional Japanese music (2).
--around 1960, Takemitsu began to be influenced by traditional Japanese instruments and the discovery of "nature" in music, a discovery in which the composer was encouraged by his encounter with John Cage (2)
--Takemitsu's writing about music rarely gives away any technical information about his musical construction or contains music-type examples, concerning itself instead with abstract philosophical problems expressed in a flowery and poetic language. Many commentators--particularly in Japan--have followed this example with dealing with music on this level, rather than venturing into the denseness of his actual compositional method (2-3).
--to understand Takemitsu's achievement, it is necessary to see him not only in relation to the international Western music scene, but also in relation to the aesthetic preoccupations of the composers who preceeded him in the decades since Western music was first introduced in Japan (3).
Chapter 1:
--It was first with Shuji Izawa (1851-1917), an aristocratic Ministry official, that one catches sight of a yearning to somehow synthesize Japanese and European musics in a higher unity. How and why? He went to America to examine American pedagogical methods, and to study music in the Boston Music School, and upon his return to Japan, he recommended that a "Music Study Committee"--effectively a small music college--was formed. He also set forth his ideals for musical education in his "Plan for the Study of Music." In this he proposes three general theories of how to study. The third of which he favored: the possibility of "taking a middle course between the two views [excluding either Japanese or Western culture through music], and by blending Eastern and Western music establish[ing] a new kind of music which is suitable for the Japan of today" (10).
--Japanese composers soon began to receive Western-style music training. This began to become apparent through music quickly (11).
--how Debussy was exposed to Asiatic music at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Led to an epiphany in his approach to composition (13).
--Takemitsu and others were influenced by Debussy and discovered Asiatic styles through him (as well as through Cage). He himself later described this as "reciprocal action"--musical art which was reimported to Japan (14).
--Yasuji Kiyose (1899-1981) is usually cited as Takemitsu's only formal teacher. He was one of the composers who formed the Shinko Sakkyokuka Renmei ("Progressive Composers' League") in 1930. Composers in this league operated in a nationalistic way, similar to the way, say, Bartok and Kodaly worked in Hungary, etc. (15).
--Music by nationalistic composers (minzokushugi composers) seems to have enjoyed considerable success/popularity in pre-war Japan.
--other composers, such as Yoshiro Irino, Makoto Moroi and Minao Shibata experimented with works employing traditional Japanese instruments, often in combination with Western resources (17).
--Jikken Kobo--the "Experimental Workshop." Its presence on the map of the post-war Japanese music marks one of the beginnings of the emergence of a true avant-garde, or an alternative to "academic" tradition or "nationalist" rhetoric. One of the founding members of this group was Takemitsu. At the time his had just celebrated his 21st b-day (19).
Here we go.
Even though I've got several books to work with, today I'll be focusing on one: The Music of Toru Takemitsu, by Peter Burt. This book is crucial to my paper. Also, it's from a school outside of our liberry network, so I've gotta get crackin'--I'm not gonna have no late fines with this guy.
Notes on The Music of Toru Takemitsu:
Intro:
--In addition to being a composer, Takemitsu was a festival organizer, writer on aesthetics, author of detective novels, celebrity chef on Japanese TV (pg. 1)
--wrote music for concert hall, film, theater, TV and radio (1)
--book focuses on only a small area of Takemitsu's versatile creativity (1)
--composer's career falls into three "periods"; the transition from "second" to "third" was so dramatic that it has been hard for commentators to miss it (1).
--Yoko Narazaki speaks of a "change from an 'avant-garde' to a 'conservative' style" around the end of the 1970s (1)
--Burt feels that there is a second, if less spectacular distinction to be made b/w the first and second periods. This is clear from the differences in the juvenelia from the first decade of his composing career (the 1950s onwards), and the works which succeeded them from around the turn of the 1960s (2)
--in the early works, Takemitsu's style showed very clear influences from American and European composers--these influences are much more pronounced in this period (2).
--influenced by John Cage, and through him, was influenced by traditional Japanese music (2).
--around 1960, Takemitsu began to be influenced by traditional Japanese instruments and the discovery of "nature" in music, a discovery in which the composer was encouraged by his encounter with John Cage (2)
--Takemitsu's writing about music rarely gives away any technical information about his musical construction or contains music-type examples, concerning itself instead with abstract philosophical problems expressed in a flowery and poetic language. Many commentators--particularly in Japan--have followed this example with dealing with music on this level, rather than venturing into the denseness of his actual compositional method (2-3).
--to understand Takemitsu's achievement, it is necessary to see him not only in relation to the international Western music scene, but also in relation to the aesthetic preoccupations of the composers who preceeded him in the decades since Western music was first introduced in Japan (3).
Chapter 1:
--It was first with Shuji Izawa (1851-1917), an aristocratic Ministry official, that one catches sight of a yearning to somehow synthesize Japanese and European musics in a higher unity. How and why? He went to America to examine American pedagogical methods, and to study music in the Boston Music School, and upon his return to Japan, he recommended that a "Music Study Committee"--effectively a small music college--was formed. He also set forth his ideals for musical education in his "Plan for the Study of Music." In this he proposes three general theories of how to study. The third of which he favored: the possibility of "taking a middle course between the two views [excluding either Japanese or Western culture through music], and by blending Eastern and Western music establish[ing] a new kind of music which is suitable for the Japan of today" (10).
--Japanese composers soon began to receive Western-style music training. This began to become apparent through music quickly (11).
--how Debussy was exposed to Asiatic music at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Led to an epiphany in his approach to composition (13).
--Takemitsu and others were influenced by Debussy and discovered Asiatic styles through him (as well as through Cage). He himself later described this as "reciprocal action"--musical art which was reimported to Japan (14).
--Yasuji Kiyose (1899-1981) is usually cited as Takemitsu's only formal teacher. He was one of the composers who formed the Shinko Sakkyokuka Renmei ("Progressive Composers' League") in 1930. Composers in this league operated in a nationalistic way, similar to the way, say, Bartok and Kodaly worked in Hungary, etc. (15).
--Music by nationalistic composers (minzokushugi composers) seems to have enjoyed considerable success/popularity in pre-war Japan.
--other composers, such as Yoshiro Irino, Makoto Moroi and Minao Shibata experimented with works employing traditional Japanese instruments, often in combination with Western resources (17).
--Jikken Kobo--the "Experimental Workshop." Its presence on the map of the post-war Japanese music marks one of the beginnings of the emergence of a true avant-garde, or an alternative to "academic" tradition or "nationalist" rhetoric. One of the founding members of this group was Takemitsu. At the time his had just celebrated his 21st b-day (19).
Friday, October 10, 2008
The Beginning
This is the first of many (or a few?). I'll try to post this weekend. A few worries: OMG I totally have to get through a lot; if I don't start writing soon, I'm F'ed; it is already Oct. 10th. That is all for now.
Okay!
Okay!
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