Musica che affronta il silenzio - Scritti su Toru Takemitsu - Pavia ...

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
In his contribution Henry Cowell paraphrased the conference title: ‘The history of
Western music is the opposite of a East-West Music Encounter’ (Cowell 1961: 71).
While the reciprocal attraction that characterises the present is undoubtedly positive, the
status quo reflects a scission going back to the dawn of written music in the West. By
codifying melody in the diatonic modes, attention was focused ever more narrowly on the
dimensions of harmony and counterpoint. As a result of an inscrutable process of
contrary and opposing forces, it has been precisely melody and rhythm, kept in a
rudimental state in Western art music, that have undergone a considerable development in
the East. Cowell admonished his audience that not only was the age-old prejudice of
Westerners vis à vis Asiatic music (viewed as primitive and monotonous precisely
because it was not particularly developed in the dimensions which were most catered for
by Western notation) a consequence of the historical process, but that also the emergence
of a genuine interest for the East would have been impossible if Western music styles had
not begun to ‘lose their vitality toward the end of the 19 th century’ (Cowell 1961: 72). In
fact the new interest being taken by Western composers in issues in Eastern music has
much more to do with the critique of the aesthetic and technical bases of tonal
composition than might appear at first sight. Moreover Cowell argued that without an
understanding of the historical background to these types of music, the whole issue would
be much more daunting; hence the need for a ‘comparative musicology’, which he had
already championed in an article written in 1935 following a lengthy period spent in
Berlin (Cowell 2001). This need surfaced repeatedly during the Tokyo Conference, and
in the closing session the standing committee, presided over by Yehudi Menuhin,
proposed the creation of an International Institute for Comparative Music Studies. 3
This initiative taken by the numerous musicians who gathered in Tokyo reveals a precocious
intuition of the processes of globalization. Musical traditions in the East were already
under threat from the imposition of a hegemonic cultural paradigm, and their preservation
was described by the conference participants as a sort of civic mission on a global scale. We
can point to at least two spheres of 20 th century musical production in which linguistic amalgamation
is immediately recognisable: avant-garde and pop music. Although the former only
has a restricted circle of exponents and consumers, it is characterised by a universalistic vocation
which is not always conscious or explicit. In fact avant-garde regards itself as the most
recent stage in the development of art music and thus as an integral part of an educational
system which can be exported to other parts of the world. Pop music, on the other hand, is the
product of industrial society and thanks to the new media and their potential for all-pervasive
communication, disseminates the model of the American pop song worldwide with its social,
ideological and behavioural connotations. Sonorities extraneous to this model can be introduced
to give it more appeal, but such modifications are transient and do not affect the
3 Cf. Music – East and West (1961: 227). This proposal may well have led to the founding of the Internationales
Institut für Traditionelle Musik in West Berlin (1963); Danielou was the first director.
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