Product Description

In these writings, available here in English for the first time, the distinguished Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu reflects on his contemporaries, including John Cage, Olivier Messiaen, and Merce Cunningham; on nature, which has profoundly influenced his composition; on film and painting; on relationships between East and West; on traditional Japanese music; and on his own compositions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #545399 in Books
• Published on: 2010-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 156 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Japanese

Customer Reviews

Deeply profound,almost haiku-like in brevity,gentleness
"But I think of time as circular and continuity as a constant changing state." So said Toru Takemitsu in this modest yet profoundly readable book. He has been writing on his music, all of it where his creativity has touched all genres including a sizable repertoire in film, since 1960s. This work here is haiku-like excerpts, But for Takemitsu that's all we really need for he ascends right to the center of where creativity occurs squarely on point. If thinking on music knows some geometric graphic, the shortest distance between two points it is here. He is a deep thinker, when his November Steps for Orcehstra was performed by The New York Philharmonic,he wandered the streets around his hotel in Manhatten trying to get the experience inside him, to wind it down in a way.Silence is what nature has given us, we then as creators fill it, or structure sounds around silence. He keeps his own culture rich in complexity always in the forefront of his thinking. He compares for instance the simultaneous complexity of the Japanese instruments, the shakuhachi flute and the biwa,like a lute, and the overwhelming experience when he first heard a Western size orchestra in The United States.He has written for both in an interesting way, trying to forge an East-West amalgam,knowing the conceptual limitations of both genres.Takemitsu's music comes from nature, he has essays here on water,trees,silence and gardens, and he equates the durational part of his orchestral work as like a quiet private walk in a garden.If you ever heard his music it is rich in textural display,colourful knowing full the uniqueness of timbre from any instrument. Frequently his orchestral work features an instrument to function almost like a concerto. Dreams are also important to him as his work" A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden" where his orchestral thinking lends itself quite well toward a timeless canvas of sound,sputtering and slowly transforming from colour to colour in the orchestra. You rarely feel the barline pulse in his music. On his film work,he was the first to purely utilize simple percussive sounds as wind-chimes,maraca and bamboo chimes as accompaniment to film, which is now the lingua franca of the film composers repertoire.There is nothing like the placement of a sharp maraca pulse with silences to create a sense of tension and danger. He won an award for his score to Kurosawa's "Ran" a deeply violent film with literally hundreds of extras fighting battles of early aristocratic agrarian struggles. There are also sensitive portraits of other artists as John Cage,who had helped Takemitsu find a place in the West. There was still animosity against the Japanese that went well into the Sixties from the Second World War in artistic circles as well. So we hardly knew of this rich repertoire of orchestral work out of Japan. His reflections extended to a music festival in Honolulu where the visual artist Jasper Johns was in attendance and recalls his briefcase had only a deck of cards, a carton of cigarettes, a mystery novel and a sketchpad. The sketchpad was used for a work the Johns completed while there renting a studio.The "Watchmen" was the painting left behind.

A couple of possibly useful essays, a whole lot of filler
CONFRONTING SILENCE is a slim (143-page plus index) collection of writings by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu published in 1995, a year before his untimely death. Translated and edited by Yoshiko Kakudo and Glenn Glasgow, the contents come from varied sources, some magazine or newspaper articles, others lectures to university crowds. The advertised foreward by Seiji Ozawa is a single paragraph saying basically "I am happy you can read my friend's work." A few of the writings here are useful towards appreciating Takemitsu's work and aesthetic, but I found that most were of limited value.

"Notes on November Steps" is a series of reminisces on the 1967 composition and premier of Takemitsu's great piece combining the Western orchestra with two Japanese instruments, the biwa and shakuhachi. The description of the challenges Takemitsu faced in combining these two traditions, and of the tension between the modern composer and conservative orchestra are highly interesting and make for greater appreciation of the piece. "Dream and Number" is an exegesis of his several of his pieces, most notably "A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden", telling of inspirations from dreams and the abundance of reference to the number five. It is lavishly illustrated with score samples. It is the only substantial musicological writing here. "Sound of East, Sound of West" consists of musings on the special traits of certain indigenous musical traditions of the world, and contains some worthwhile thoughts on Japanese music and their exportability.

Most of the pieces, however, are fluff. An obituary essay in memory of Feldman, Nono, and Messiaen is just a simple explanation of who they were and when they died, without any clear information on how they influenced Takemitsu's music. Some of the content is repeated, for how many times do we need the same description of the biwa? "Nature and Music", apparently extracts from Takemitsu's diary, are written in an exceedingly hermetic style that doesn't communicate well with the reader. All in all, I'd recommend this book only to committed fans of Takemitsu, and flipping through it in a university library may be the best course of action. If you are looking for a book-length treatment of Takemitsu and his work, Peter Burt's THE MUSIC OF TORU TAKEMITSU (Cambridge University Press, 2001) is the thing to get.