Not only Japan's finest composer but also one of the great composers of the last century, Toru Takemitsu is only now, seven years after his death, beginning to receive the foreign critical attention that he deserves.
Though a number of assessments of Takemitsu's work have been made by Japanese critics, beginning from as early as the 1970s, the main publications in English have been two collections of Takemitsu's theoretical writings and uncollected papers by scholars such as Francisco Felciano, Luciana Galliano, Jamese Gibson, Timothy Koozen and Richard Toop.
A number of Takemitsu scholars met at a symposium held in 1998 in Sydney to mark the second anniversary of the composer's death. The volume edited by Hugh de Ferranti and Yoko Narazaki brings these papers together and provides an anthology intended to offer "new perspectives and information on an internationally prominent artist about whom there is a vast amount of writing in Japanese, but still relatively little in European languages."
The Australian composer Barry Conyngham and the Japanese composer Joji Yuasa write of the man himself and his attitude toward composition, while his place in the Japanese avant-garde is discussed by Toop and Galliano, among others.
Of special interest are those papers that address Takemitsu's style and offer analytical perspectives into his work. The composer Matthew Shlomowitz writes of the influence of French composer Olivier Messiaen on Takemitsu, but most of the contributions concern Japanese influences. De Ferranti offers a full and detailed paper on Takemitsu's use of the biwa, and Yayoi Uno Everett and Steven Nuss continue the discussion, while Narazaki writes of Takemitsu's "Japanese" use of atonality and tone clusters.
Among the most interesting papers is Peter Burt's provocative piece on serialism and the limits of analysis. He points out that it is possible to recognize "the presence of a more rigorously analytical academic tradition in the work of Western commentators, and a more subtly speculative one in the work of their Eastern counterparts."
It is true that Japanese commentators are often more concerned with synthesis than with analysis, and it is just this analytic concern that has been missing in Takemitsu studies until now. This Burt gives us in full measure in his very useful new book on the composer's music.
He gives the fullest account of Takemitsu's early years now available, an admirable analysis of the 1957 "Requiem" (a key work in the Takemitsu canon), and takes into account the very great effect that a meeting with musician John Cage had on the composer. He notes the increasing claims of tonality on the style, and writes with knowledge and sympathy of the later works.
This is an important book that demands the many musical examples that illuminate its pages. There is also a listing of Takemitsu's work (the de Ferranti/Narazaki volume has none), but no listing of the many recordings of the composer's work. This will be provided, with much else, in a forthcoming special issue of the Contemporary Music Review (Vol. 21, No. 2) devoted to Takemitsu, edited by Burt and appearing later this year.
It will contain a personal essay by the composer Jo Kondo, Nuss' continued investigations into the "Japaneseness" of the composer, Koozen's study of the late works, Burt's paper on the use of the Lydian mode (of prime importance in Takemitsu's music), and, among other contributions, my own on Takemitsu's many film scores.
With these two books the English reader is now offered a firm evaluation of the composer and his work. These are properly concerned with the music itself, but someone might sometime write a paper on Takemitsu and his use of English. Completely fluent and quite capable of both idiomatic and arcane conversation, Takemitsu was so interested in advanced language that the ignorant have accused him of not knowing any English at all.
"Music of Tree," the title of a 1961 Takemitsu album, may seem hard to defend, but much of the "strange" English used by Takemitsu comes with an impressive pedigree. "A Way A Lone," the title of a piece for string quartet, and used for the Ferranti/Narazaki anthology, is not a typo. It is the beginning of the final sentence of James Joyce's "Finnigan's Wake." Takemitsu later mined the same sentence to name a 1984 piece, "riverrun," while "Far calls. Coming, far!," the title of his beautiful 1980 violin concerto, is also courtesy of Joyce and advanced, experimental English.
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