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
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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
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130
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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
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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)
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'
132
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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
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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
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134
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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
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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
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136
CRITICAL
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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merely to suggest that these com
orientation' have misunderstood Ta
his 'scorn' for deterministic cons
self-expression'
(p.
246),
or
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't
originality and invention' (p. 248).
would be moved to recant, so it is
about
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proven
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case,
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music
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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.
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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
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"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'.
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