Richard Betts on Tōru Takemitsu, the leading Japanese composer of the 20th century
If Tōru Takemitsu is today revered for his synthesis of Western forms with Eastern philosophy and culture, it wasn’t always that way.
Born in Tokyo in 1930, Takemitsu’s childhood was effectively halted by the war, and in 1944 he was conscripted into the Japanese army, an experience he described as “extremely bitter.” It caused him to turn away from Japanese culture in general, and traditional music and instruments in particular.
“I hated everything about Japan at that time because of my experience during the war,” he said.
A lack of opportunities in Japan to study the kind of music he wanted meant that Takemitsu remained mostly self-taught, but he was nevertheless championed early in his career by Stravinsky. However, it took an American, the composer John Cage, to steer Takemitsu eastward in the 1960s.
It was less Cage’s music than his interest in Zen Buddhism that intrigued Takemitsu. In subsequent attempts to capture what critic Paul Kosidowski nicely sums as “the spirit and spirituality of nature,” Takemitsu expressed not only his ‘Japaneseness’, but his rapport with the French masters Debussy and Messiaen, with whom he also shared a superb sense of orchestral colour.
November Steps (1967) was the breakthrough: Takemitsu’s first work contrasting the Japanese shakuhachi and biwa against a Western orchestra. Its success as a composition and with audiences – and the members of the New York Philharmonic, who are said to have cheered following rehearsals for November Steps’ premiere – sent Takemitsu on a new path.
Not that this road was straightforward, either. Takemitsu was astonishingly eclectic. As he got older his music became more tonal, and we know him best for works of crystalline beauty composed for the concert hall. He wasn’t beyond kitsch, though. Takemitsu’s classical guitar arrangements of pop songs, including music by The Beatles, contain occasional harmonic twists, but they’d also work as background listening for a chain of moderately priced restaurants.
Somewhere between the symphony hall and the steakhouse was the cinema. Takemitsu wrote around 100 film scores, including the music for Akiro Kurasawa’s masterpiece Ran. Auckland Philharmonia’s Joie de Vivre concert (12 September) gives listeners a rare opportunity to hear Three Film Scores for Strings (1994/5), which rearranges snippets from the movies Jose Torres (1959), Black Rain (1989) and Face of Another (1966).
The first movement, ‘Jose Torres: Music of Training and Rest’, derives from a short film by Hiroshi Teshigahara about a Puerto Rican boxer. The movie was shot in New York, and Takemitsu’s five-minute piece has the bluesy sway of a Gershwin or a Bernstein, but without either’s brassy NYC edge.
‘Black Rain: Funeral Music’ – unrelated to the Ridley Scott/Michael Douglas action flick – is a contemplation on the bombing of Hiroshima. Takemitsu’s music is suitably intense and brooding.
The final movement, ‘Face of Another: Waltz’ is the shortest of the three, a too-brief two-and-a-half minutes, whose dancing rise and fall is tinged with minor-key regret.
Three Film Scores was among Takemitsu’s last works. He died in 1996, the most celebrated Japanese composer both inside the country and out, a final synthesis of East and West, played out in acclaim.
The New Zealand Herald Premier Series
Joie de Vivre
7.30pm, Thursday 12 September
Conductor Samy Rachid
Piano Louis Schwizgebel
Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin
Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No.2
Takemitsu Three Film Scores for Strings
Poulenc Sinfonietta