Review Reviewed Work(s): The Music of Tōru Takemitsu by Peter Burt Review by: Charles Wilson Source: Music Analysis , Mar., 2004, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 129-142 Published by: Wiley Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3700431 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Music Analysis This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Peter Burt, The Music of Thru Takemitsu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). xi + 294 pp. ?45.00. ISBN 0-521-78220-1 (hb). Peter Burt's handsomely produced study of Takemitsu enters a field in which it has, as yet, no rival. The only other English-language monograph to date, Noriko Ohtake's Creative Sources for the Music of Toru Takemnitsu, hinted in its title at ambitions more modest than those of a critical survey; and, in the event, it was anything but critical, echoing faithfully the tone of voice familiar from the composer's writings, when not paraphrasing or quoting them directly.' Given the unavailability a decade ago of all but a few of Takemitsu's essays in translation, even that seemed better than nothing, though the gap has since been more effectively plugged by an edition of selected writings.2 Of the few other non-Japanese studies, this new book surpasses its nearest equivalent, Alain Poirier's shorter French-language text, in both its breadth of coverage and seriousness of scholarly engagement.3 What is announced by its dustjacket as the 'first complete study' of the composer in English therefore marks, by any standards, a significant moment in Takemitsu scholarship. The dust-jacket also indicates that the book is out to challenge hitherto dominant modes of reception. The composer's own commentaries, it suggests, have 'tended to deepen the mystery' surrounding his music, while 'much writing on Takemitsu to date has adopted a similar attitude, leaving many questions about his compositional method unanswered'. Against this the book's cover promises 'in-depth analysis' and an attempt 'to shed light on the hitherto rather secretive world of his working methods' - in short, what sounds like a bold agenda of demystification. This is a welcome prospect since, where Takemitsu is concerned, the void of ignorance is readily filled by preconception and stereotype. The cover photograph, for instance, showing the composer in prayerful pose, eyes fastened contemplatively in the middle distance, may foster the image of some quietist, hermetic figure who fell reluctantly under a wider international gaze. But, as Burt's introduction makes clear, this was a man by no means ill at ease in the public arena: practically a household name in Japan (also a writer of detective fiction and an occasional television chef), he was a tireless new music impresario, who travelled widely and kept himself keenly abreast of musical developments abroad. Many associate him automatically with the 'fusion' of Japanese and Western European instrumental traditions, epitomised in the work that brought him to international prominence, November Steps (1967) for biwa, shakuhachi and Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) 129 ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005. Published by Blackwel This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 130 CRITICAL FORUM orchestra. So it is good to be rem eight concert works not compos Finally, much as his music attracte compensate for meagre productiv Takemitsu was remarkably prolif problem for Burt. Even the exclus total) and the incidental music for around 130 concert works to consider. In the ten roughly chronological chapters which form the core of the book (after a useful overview of the history of Western-style art music in Japan), nearly all these compositions are drawn into the discussion, with anything from a passing mention to three or four pages of commentary. This comprehensiveness undoubtedly enhances the book's value as a reference source, but at times it was hard not to wish for something more selective, or at least more opinionated. Getting to grips with an output of this size is likely to entail deciding sooner or later which works matter more than others. But Burt's reverence towards his subject (the word 'genius' slips out in the introduction's very first sentence) makes him reticent on matters of critical evaluation. While I found only one mildly pejorative comment (on the 'rather basic' orchestration of an early work, Solitude sonore, p. 59), there is equally little that suggests how or why particular works succeed. The scare quotation marks with which the text is liberally peppered seem at certain times indicative of this reluctance to commit to judgement, at others of an unwanted terminological looseness. A theory-based analytical component would appear, on the evidence of previous titles, not to be a prerequisite of Cambridge's 'Music in the Twentieth Century' series. Nonetheless, in his introduction, Burt announces that his approach will be 'primarily an analytical one' (p. 2). Given the amount of ground to be covered, this would be a tall order by any reckoning. The danger of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus is that it can seem gratuitous or redundant if not exploited to its full potential; and the challenge of maintaining the requisite methodological consistency across such a quantity and diversity of music, all the while staving off images of sledgehammers and nuts, should not be underestimated. To those who may be anxious on this point Burt offers little in the way of reassurance. The chosen approach, he writes, to a certain extent reflects the perceptual biases and academic training of the author ... rather than any intrinsic advantages such a method might have when applied to Takemitsu's music. In fact, the latter is emphatically not carefully put together for the benefit of future academics to take apart again, and analytic approaches towards it therefore have a tendency to take the researcher up what eventually proves to be a blind alley. Takemitsu's own writing about music, significantly, rarely gives away any technical information about his musical construction or contains music-type examples, concerning itself instead with ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CRITICAL FORUM 131 abstract philosophical problems exp One has the feeling, therefore, that poser's own preferred concept of ap ing to submit his music to dissect analysis, and is perhaps justly reward (pp. 2-3) I doubt if anyone especially rel through over two hundred pag methodology that that may ill-calculated lack 'intrin suggestion Bu analytical readings that follow, s implications here. The insistenc together for ... future academics the idea that analysis is primarily so it seems, to that hoary old not practice in which reconstructio primary, perhaps even the exclus usually depends on a trail of tech such information insurmountable regarded that sets other merely the as agenda complex in Takemitsu obstacle an for to the open a an sesa 'correct functions as we below, the way the style and ideo arguably misrepresent, the realit of reading and analysing both though, appears to view any approach that disregards the composer's 'preferred concept of appropriate descriptive language' as an unpardonable hubris. And there is still a worse sin: reference to 'dissection with the precision tools of Western analysis' suggests that European or North American analytical methodology constitutes by definition an imposition - at best superfluous, at worst ethnocentric - on the music of an ethnically non-Western composer. At any rate, the music's 'impenetrability' in the face of such attempts at scholarly invasion seems to confirm Takemitsu's status as an imponderable individual, whose music exists in a realm 'beyond analysis'. As Burt goes on to write of his analytical approach, by its very impotence to explain the whole of Takemitsu's creative thinking, it illustrates the extent to which the construction of his music is governed by decisions of a more 'irrational' nature, which even the most inventive of scholars is powerless to account for. Mapping out the area which is tractable to analysis, in other words, at the same time gives the measure of that vaster territory which is not. (p. 3, author's emphasis) Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ' 132 CRITICAL FORUM The rigid demarcation drawn her to analysis immediately hints at the ultimate powerlessness of the of it, an anti-positivist sceptici reveals itself as positivistic to a f quantifiable of parameters, pitch in music so often reliant on gest And within that domain it focuses on the most rigid and exclusive types of relationship, those predicated on absolute identity (set-class and row-class membership) and inclusion, over and above similarity relationships between set-classes or less formal kinds of association and analogy. Given such methodological restrictions, a degree of disappointment with the results becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Burt's apparatus does at times yield interesting and satisfying results especially in respect of the modally orientated works of the 1950s. Here the concept of set-class, whether invoked explicitly or implicitly (in terms of scale or collection), is of evident usefulness.4 No doubt with the book's wide community of anticipated readers in mind, the use of Forte names is kept to a minimum, reserved mostly for collections that lack any other convenient shorthand: hence we get frequent reference to 7-33 (the whole-tone collection with one extraneous pitch-class) and 6-20 (the set which many have now taken to calling the hexatonic),5 but never 8-28, which is instead simply referred to as the 'octatonic' or 'Mode II' (Messiaen's other modes of limited transposition, notably the third and sixth, are likewise referred to by number). But set-class relationships are not invoked in every case, and the drawbacks of such inconsistency are evident in Burt's analysis of an early work for violin and piano, Distance de fe (1951). His Ex. 7 (p. 36) shows the transformations which the piano's opening sequence of five chords undergoes in the first half of the piece. While elsewhere Takemitsu makes frequent use of literal repetition, this transformational process highlights by contrast what Burt calls 'a sort of "paramnesic" recollection of earlier material, in which various features are subjected to minute, apparently arbitrary, alteration in one way or other' (p. 35, my emphasis). He chronicles the techniques used here for 'disguising' these repeated materials, which include, in the second version of the progression at bar 20, the omission of the fourth chord of the original sequence, the appending of a 'double appoggiatura' to the third and, in the fifth chord, two pitch substitutions in the right hand and the transposition of the left hand down a minor third. Enumerating the changes in this way certainly makes them sound arbitrary. But had they been considered in the light of an earlier observation about the work's pervasive octatonicism (p. 33), they would have seemed far from that. The original progression at bar 1 unfolds an octatonic collection (in the semitone-tone ordering) on Db, as indeed does the second ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CRITICAL version at bar 20. FORUM In the 133 latter i 'double appoggiatura', serves to co the omission of chord 4) would h chord 5 likewise fall consistently While the consistent octatonic 'adequate explanation' for these alterations of the kind to satisfy a Milton Babbitt, it gives me sufficient reason to quarrel with the word 'arbitrary'. But then, in Burt's dualistic scheme of things, there seems to be no middle ground between arbitrariness and determinism, the rigorous and the 'cavalier'. This last word crops up notably in the analysis of the piano work Uninterrupted Rest, in particular its second movement, composed in 1959. The subheading under which this discussion appears, 'Early adventures in serialism', takes on a somewhat ironic significance, since Burt mostly concludes that the presence of note rows constitutes merely a surface conceit. Hence, despite the appearance in the first five bars of two row statements, Po and then P3 (the latter missing its third pitch-class), and a further 'unequivocal statement' of I0 in bars 21-3, Uninterrupted Rest II is 'not serial music of any sort' and any attempt to analyse it in that way would be 'foolhardy' (p. 66). If, by 'serial', the author means merely a textbook model of twelve-note technique, then he is undoubtedly right. The texture's saturation with octatonic pentachords and heptachords, none of which can be sourced from adjacent pitch-classes of the initial ordering, would appear to preclude any straightforward use of the row under standard interval-preserving operations. But serial technique had come to mean a good deal more than this by the 1950s, and Burt omits to consider that the row might be exerting an influence of a different kind. For instance, inverted and prime forms of the octatonic heptachord, 7-31, can be generated from the Boulezian multiplication of, respectively, the row's first and second and first and fourth trichords: indeed the chord in bars 9-11 (included in Burt's Ex. 24 but not labelled or commented upon) represents an instance of the uninverted prime form, 7-31A.6 The sense of something potentially more systematic than a 'very free study in timbre and texture' (p. 67) is further reinforced by the other highly organised features of the movement that Burt proceeds to demonstrate, including the wholesale retrogradation of substantial blocks of pitch-class material. Burt seems adamant that nothing in the piece apart from the row statements he identifies are serially derived. But the difficulty of demonstrating how a piece of this vintage is serial can rarely be taken as sufficient and final evidence that it is not; and his lack of curiosity concerning the possible relationship between the posited row-class and the remainder of the material - saturated as it is with its distinctive trichordal components such as 3-10, 3-2A, 3-2B and 3-3A - is puzzling. But then Burt is pinning a good deal on these seeming breakdowns o compositional logic. In the final chapter Takemitsu's failure to pursue Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 134 CRITICAL FORUM consequences of serial and other such systematic procedures is cited as evidence of 'the degree to which he held constructional processes to be merely "trivial"' (p. 244). And for confirmation of this attitude he turns to the composer's own writings, quoting a ritual denunciation of twelve-note technique ('The mathematical and geometrical pursuit of sound apparent in this technique is purely an intellectual art'), along with a few more nebulous anti-constructivist utterances (such as 'the work of inventing and constructing music really holds no interest for me').7 Such 'express comments' are therefore taken as straightforward explanations of Takemitsu's compositional practice. And this in spite of the considerable counter-evidence already provided illustrations of all manner of constructivist procedures, from isorhythm and Ligeti-like microcanon in Autumn (1973) to the systematic inversion and retrogradation of whole movements or blocks of material in Ring (1961) and Coral Island (1962), though here too Takemitsu's apparent failure to pursue the 'consequences' of such techniques is used to downplay their significance. Surely, though, just about all composers who rely on constructivist devices are given to making light of them. From Schoenberg's well-attested reluctance to discuss the mechanics of twelve-note technique, this 'disavowal of constructivism', as I am tempted to call it, has become an utterly routine position- taking among modernist composers (sometimes all the more pronounced among those with more to conceal).8 Burt's notions of 'strictness' and 'consistency' in any case seem like rather remote and monolithic abstractions, rarely related to the actual practice of other composers. If one were to accept that rigour need not mean absolute predictability or monorail automatism, then a good deal of Takemitsu's music might yet qualify. Nonetheless, the composer's inimical relationship to 'structural rigour' is accorded a still more profound significance. The instances of 'arbitrary change' in Distance de fee had suggested to Burt a practice that 'contrasts sharply with the deterministic rigour of many of [Takemitsu's] Western colleagues' (p. 35), and which may 'give the impression - at least to a Western reader - of a certain imprecision' (p. 37). The implications of 'Western' in both these sentences is slightly unsettling. This is not the only occasion on which Western 'determinism' seems to be juxtaposed against Eastern 'arbitrariness', Western 'rationality' against Eastern 'irrationality'. Burt seems to be suggesting that 'determinism' is intrinsically alien to East Asian composers, and, what is more, that 'we' Westerners who bring to the music our deterministic modes of investigation and analysis are, by virtue of our 'outside' perspective, inherently incapable of penetrating the music's true meaning. Both suggestions seem close to a dangerous essentialism. Takemitsu's music might occasionally seem irrational, arbitrary or inscrutable: but so equally might the music of Maderna, Kagel, Christian Wolff or, for that matter, Boulez. That it seems that way from a certain interpretative perspective does not make it ineluctably so - and ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CRITICAL certainly the first not so FORUM by dint 135 of commentator some to invo conclusions like these. But why s determinant when considering any composer, let alone one wh rooted predominantly in Western For in so many ways Takemitsu to that of many Europeans of his by engagement with a moderni this instance, but Messiaen), f according to Burt, pseudo-seri composition, before a return to g occasional quotation and pastich essentially postmodern, ironic awareness at each of the stage state of his of the career, com in p centre of the action.9 But at the engagement with Japanese tradit importance. Burt charts the p rejection of all things Japanese' a II, Takemitsu sought an 'experim the works involving Japanese i roughly from the memorably Garden) arriving at 'a more thoug a fundamentally Western com borrowing of Japanese scales an favoured by his nationalist prede a set of 'abstract', ideological preocc philosophical aspects of a sound-wor and Western in substance. But if Takemitsu thus used 'an international musical vocabulary to express an indigenous Japanese aesthetic goal', there was at the same time something in the nature of that 'international musical vocabulary' itself, at that particular moment in its historical development, which facilitated the process by meeting him somewhere along the way. For another important aspect of Takemitsu's achievement was his discovery of several points of congruence between certain aspects of his own native culture - at least, as he interpreted them - and the contemporary preoccupations of a number of 'advanced' musicians in the West. (p. 236)10 Burt goes on to cite a number of these 'points of congruence', again relying on allusions drawn from Takemitsu's writings: the idea of 'garden' form, with its connections both to concepts of stratified instrumentation and the 'open work'; the use of space and movement in instrumental performance, characteristic also Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 136 CRITICAL FORUM of Japanese theatre; to Cage's philosophy layers in no the notion of of silence and drama; and the imp inflections, common to both tradi experimental traditions (p. 236). B influences, Burt seems to leave flowed only one way - in other w actual stimulus from Japanese tra matter of its invocation, as an alib Western avant-garde or experimen occasionally borrowed directly f music. Far from implausible is B tonic verticalisations of A Flock D and characteristic dynamic swellin tive clustered Takemitsu, as harmonies for so many of th other t no matter of straightforward inheritance. Though he became notably authoritative in later life on the subject of Japanese traditional music - which he came to refer to as 'our music' as distinct from 'Western music'' - there is no doubt that his initial encounters with it were from a perceived standpoint o alterity. He suggested as much himself in a newspaper article published three years before his death, remarking on the 'advantage for a Japanese composer who has studied modern Western music - [that] he can view his own Japanese tradition from within but with another's eyes'.12 That Takemitsu's view of his own culture was moulded significantly by Western images of it - and Western images of a quite specific kind - seems altogether undeniable. Crucial in this respect was the encounter with Cage. As Burt acknowledges, Cage's eclectic interests in Asian philosophy appeared, for Japanese composers of the postwar generation, to give their culture 'the seal of Western endorsement', leaving them free 'to explore aspects of their own tradition without fear that they might be lapsing into some kind of pre-war nationalistic "Zealotism"' (p. 96). But, while acknowledging the peculiar nature of this '"feedback loop" whereby "Eastern" ideas are reimported from the West to their point of origin' (p. 96), Burt is coy on the extent to which Takemitsu's view of his own culture was refracted in the process. There is little to suggest that he views Takemitsu's invocations of Japanese aesthetics as anything other than wholly authentic and, what is more, integral and essential to the music. But the reality is surely more complex. Edward Said famously remarked on the phenomenon of the consumption and reproduction of Western cultural images of the Orient in and by the Orient, suggesting that in this way the 'modern Orient ... participates in its own orientalising'.i3 Takemitsu's frequent references to the 'unpolished mirror' of Asian music ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CRITICAL FORUM 137 versus the 'polished mirror' of Western music invoke the familiar exoticist dualisms of Western artificiality versus Eastern purity, the cultivated West versus the static and timeless East.14 Hence, in a recent essay, John Corbett views Takemitsu's work as a manifestation of a broader late twentieth-century compositional phenomenon he calls 'Asian neo-Orientalism', in which 'the Oriental' is considered 'as it is found in Cage and his lineage ... as much as ... in Asian traditions closer to home'. And what often results from this is a confirmation of Western Orientalist stereotypes which, by virtue of be articulated by Asians themselves, all of a sudden seem 'endowed with the irrefutable aura of ethnic authenticity' and therefore invulnerable to refutation or challenge.'" As an example of such a stereotype Corbett cites the notion of the Oriental with privileged access to the 'voice of nature', a trope selfevidently alive both in Takemitsu's books and essays - 'As long as we live, we aspire to harmonize with nature'16- and in the many work-titles that feature natural phenomena (Garden Rain, Waterways, Tree Line and so on). Cage's influence on the rhetoric of Takemitsu's prose writings survived beyond the latter's flirtations with indeterminacy and graphic notation during the 1960s. Hence we continue to encounter such formulations as 'the task of the composer should begin with the recognition of the more basic sounds themselves rather than with concern about their function', and 'when sounds are possessed by ideas instead of having their own identity music suffers' - both strikingly redolent of that best-known of Cage injunctions, to 'give up the desire to control sound [and] let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments'." Burt cites these statements as evidence both that Takemitsu's perceptual priorities 'are in harmony ... with those of traditional Japanese music' and as indicative of a continued commitment to Cage's ideas in that they involve 'a certain abdication of compositional control' (p. 242). Again the composer's prose is read as encapsulating the essence of his compositional practice, rather than as a manifestation of a particular and, to some extent, autonomous discursive mode - one ideally suited to Takemitsu's calling as an 'Oriental' composer in the image of the West. Indeed, for the most part, Burt is entirely in thrall to Takemitsu's Cageian rhetoric.l' He insists continually on the composer's preoccupation with 'actual sound materials' over 'abstract discourse' (pp. 245-6), 'sound' over 'syntax' (p. 249), the 'individual event, not the relationships between such events' (p. 249). To listen to Takemitsu one must 'hear sounds in themselves' and 'suspend the organising faculty in favour of a direct perception of the actual reality of sound-phenomena' (p. 252). This suggests that the music (and Burt appears not to differentiate here between differing phases of the composer's output) is all just a matter of isolated, free-floating sound objects - a judgement surely far-fetched in the extreme. Even where the music lacks a binding note-to-note syntax, that does not thereby make it free of continuity or even of conventional motivic relationships - why Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 138 CRITICAL else, after FORUM all, did we dwell for so motif (Eb-E-A) and other recurrent nor does the absence from the mat schemata as the surprisingly lite orchestra (the subject of Burt's E '"form" in the Western sense' (p mean. Indeed, far from putting listeners' 'organising faculties' is music that arguably makes constant demands on that m them all - memory - in its concern with the mutability gestures over time. One moment of telling transparency f point of the orchestral work Dream/Window (1985) will illu 'L' the distinctive four-note motive from the work's op figure', as Burt appropriately characterises it, p. 220) r time, a clearly audible response in the form of a descen figure, which turns out to be the inversion at the tritone ordered in register. In almost didactic fashion, Takemitsu this transposed inversion has been playing since the beg providing (in combination with its original form) the harm bars (saturated by Messiaen's Mode III) as well as, more u upward flourishes with which the solo flute and clarinet ( group of instrumental soloists) enter - material that, on it seemed explicitly counterposed to the zig-zag motto. But t with its inversion, penetrates the soloists' lines only after their relationship at letter 'L', as if the ensembles behind just then forwarded a crucial piece of information. The te therefore integral to the way in which these motivic relationships are expounded. But Burt's brief discussion of the work, like that of so many others in the two penultimate chapters, is strictly hors-temps, focusing on the abstract, 'context-free' relationships latent within precompositional materials. The four-note motive is mentioned only with reference to its borrowing in a later work, Quotation of Dream (1991), while another element of the precompositional material identified by Takemitsu - a twelve-note set and its trichordal partitionings - is simply parsed for its intervallic properties. Given his reverence towards the composer's other most cherished categories,19 Burt's reluctance to address issues of time and temporality as they affect the presentation of such material is indeed surprising. Increasingly as one moves through the book the self-imposed limitations of the analytical approach are cause for frustration. And only towards the very end does Burt entertain alternatives. He praises, for instance, the work of certain Japanese analysts which focuses on gesture, timbre and texture, thus moving beyond the 'impasse' of 'conventional, pitch-based analysis' (p. 250). ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CRITICAL FORUM And one wishes too that the brief but convincing of From which Far Beyond abandons 139 there had examinat Chrysanthe 'absolute identity favour of a 'more diffuse variet suggestive for doing so. But ult troubling than the conclusions t namely that there is music. Burt suggests something in that listenin of phenomena, unmediated by 'awareness of the boundless com distracting simplifications of c emphasis). It is telling that Burt necessarily reductive, limiting and interpretation rather than sugg telling still is the way 'conceptu bypassed at will. Even if there were such a thing as an 'immaculate perception',20 unmediated by conceptual categories of any kind, surely making use of it in this context would impoverish our experience of Takemitsu's music, with its richness (to some a superfluity) of unselfconscious stylistic and (twentieth-century) historical allusion. Listening to this music in a way that engages memory in conjunction with a sense of history certainly seems to me a more attractive prospect than absorbing it, as Burt seems to propose, merely as a nebulous, ambient flux of 'sounds in themselves' - less the 'sea of tonality' (to use a Takemitsu metaphor much exploited by Burt) than the 'ocean of sound'.21 Indeed, refusing such an opportunity to conceptualise the composer's work afresh merely forces us back onto a range of hackneyed critical characterisations, of which the idea of some static, timeless manifestation of the sounds of nature is just one example. So we find ourselves almost back full circle. Burt began with laudable aims, but too many of them sadly founder. His intention was to discuss Takemitsu in his own terms; but he does so with insufficient recognition of the extent to which those terms were shaped and pre-empted by Western expectations and cultural stereotypes. He is anxious to avoid the imposition of culturally 'inappropriate' interpretative or methodological assumptions; but this leads him to the point of seeming to disqualify himself, along with other 'Westerners', from a proper insight into Takemitsu's music, thus reinforcing one of the most powerful essentialisms of all - that of Asian cultural products as inherently impenetrable and inscrutable. When, in the final chapter, he comes to address the principal accusations of Takemitsu's detractors - namely a lack of structural rigour, a cloying sensuousness, and a shameless derivativeness and eclecticism - his instinct is not to seek to counter or deny them, but Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 140 CRITICAL FORUM merely to suggest that these com orientation' have misunderstood Ta his 'scorn' for deterministic cons self-expression' (p. 246), or his 't originality and invention' (p. 248). would be moved to recant, so it is about Takemitsu proven cause to be and the more representations through case, it willing to do a readi may to this take challe music fu CHARLES WILSON NOTES 1. Noriko Ohtake, Creative Sources for the Music of Toru Takemit Scolar Press, 1993). 2. Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings, trans. Y and Glenn Glasow (Berkeley, CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995). 3. Alain Poirier, Taru Takemitsu (Paris: Michel de Maule, 1996). 4. Burt makes frequent reference to Timothy Koozin's work on the composer, in which issues of mode and collection feature prominently: see especially Koozin, 'Octatonicism in Recent Solo Piano Works of T6ru Takemitsu', Perspectives of New Music, 29/i (1991), pp. 124-40, and 'Spiritual-Temporal Imagery in the Music of Olivier Messiaen and Toru Takemitsu', Contemporary Music Review, 7 (1993), pp. 185-202. 5. This application of the term was introduced in Richard Cohn, 'Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Music', Music Analysis, 15 (1996), pp. 9-40. 6. Boulez first published an account of his multiplication technique in 'Eventuellement', Revue musicale, 212 (1952), pp. 117-48; an English language version appears in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 111-40. While he is unlikely to have encountered the article, Takemitsu may well have heard about the technique anecdotally from a colleague such as Toshiro Mayuzumi, who studied in Paris in the 1950s. Under multiplication (or, in Richard Cohn's terminology, transpositional combination) non-symmetrical (TnI) set classes will tend to yield different products from their counterparts under inversion: hence the specification here of Tn set classes. For useful theorisations of this operation (drawn from the authors' respective dissertations on the topic), see Richard Cohn, 'Inversional Symmetry and Transpositional Combination in Bart6k', Music Theory Spectrum, 10 (1988), pp. 19-42, and Stephen J. Heinemann, 'Pitch-Class Set Multiplication in Theory and Practice', Music Theory Spectrum, 20 (1998), pp. 72-96. O Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CRITICAL FORUM 141 7. Confronting Silence, pp. 80 and 14. 8. Interestingly, Takemitsu appeared to be more open about such private technical preoccupations in those instances where they seemed to chime with his mystical or overtly numerological obsessions: hence the detailed account of pitch structure he provided (magic squares and all) for A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977), where the number five has an obvious and quasi-programmatic significance; see 'Dream and Number' (1984), in Confronting Silence, pp. 97-126. 9. Burt writes that 'around the turn of the 1960s, as Takemitsu becomes more aware of - and, in many cases, often comes into contact with - his peers in the inter- national composing community, his career begins more and more to run in parallel with, and reflect the preoccupations of, the avant-garde and experimental musicians of his day' (p. 72). 10. The quotation in this passage is from Timothy Koozin, 'The Solo Piano Works of Toru Takemitsu' (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1988), p. 549. 11. See, for instance, Takemitsu, 'Contemporary Music in Japan', Perspectives of New Music, 27/ii (1989), pp. 198-204: 'In the essence of our music I think there are things which are perhaps very different from Western music - a sense of time, a sense of space, and a sensitivity to color and tone' (pp. 203-4). 12. Confronting Silence, p. 143; from an article in Tbky5 Mainichi Shinbun, 16 (September 1993). 13. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 325. 14. See, for instance, Takemitsu, 'Mirrors', trans. Sumi Adachi, with Roger Reynolds, Perspectives of New Music, 30/i (1992), p. 47. 15. John Corbett, 'Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others', in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 179-80. 16. Confronting Silence, p. 3. 17. Ibid., pp. 80, 4; John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), p. 10. Burt goes on (p. 243) to suggest that Cage would have concurred with another Takemitsu statement, earlier quoted in full (p. 182): 'I gather sounds around me and mobilise them with the least force possible. The worst is to move them around like driving an automobile.' In fact it is less Cage than Morton Feldman who might have approved, since the comment bears a striking, and possibly uncoincidental, resemblance to a pithier remark that the latter claimed to have made to Stockhausen (when asked 'What's your secret?'): 'I don't push the sounds around'; see Feldman, 'Crippled Symmetry' (1981), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), p. 143. 18. Only once does Burt entertain the possibility of a mismatch between these 'theories', such as they are, and the musical practice, when he acknowledges that the later works, in their 'insistence on one of the most time-honoured formulae of Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 142 CRITICAL FORUM "note-by-note" discourse of all, the melodic line', seem to 'depart remarkably from his theory' of sound phenomena in themselves (p. 253). 19. Time is certainly one of these; see, for instance, the article 'My Perception of Time in Traditional Japanese Music', Contemporary Music Review, 1 (1987), pp. 9-13. 20. This notion is borrowed from Leo Treitler: see 'The Power of Positivist Thinking', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 21. David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Ima (London: Serpent's Tail, 1995). A wish to assimilate Takemitsu's music into the category of 'ambient music' is evident in an anonymous (in both senses) piece of copywriting attached to a recent recording (Deutsche Grammophon 453 495-2). In Takemitsu's music, we are told, sound and silence 'are not just metaphors for an endless music, of which we invariably hear only a snippet, but ... are of nothing less than existential significance. Many of these enigmatic, murmuring and ever-flowing currents of sounds recede once again into silence. And out of this, the composer conjures up colours of such breath-taking beauty that the sound becomes almost palpable ... music that forever strides the border between dream and reality'. ? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/i (2004) This content downloaded from 51.75.253.91 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:27:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms