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

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Gianmario Borio
structural aspects. Both avant-garde and pop music are closely linked to electronic technology,
have strong institutional references and show a tendency to absorb whatever is alien to
them. They represent the two sides of a historical divide of extraordinary importance in Western
musical culture. Nowadays one may legitimately ask whether they are not in fact the two
sides of the coin of the Western colonialist vocation. 4
Cowell was the first of a series of American composers who turned to extra-European
cultures in order to extend the compositional techniques and aesthetic insights they had developed
in their work and that betrayed an ambivalent attitude, involving both attraction
and repulsion, towards the European roots. Many of these musicians lived in California:
John Cage, Lou Harrison, Colin McPhee, Alan Hovhaness, Harry Partch, and later on La
Monte Young and Terry Riley. In an article on the history of experimental music in the
United States, written for the journal of the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in
Darmstadt immediately after his famous participation in 1958, Cage gave this parable as an
explanation for the American interest in what lay beyond the Pacific Ocean:
Men leaving Asia to go to Europe went against the wind and developed machines,
ideas, and Occidental philosophies in accord with a struggle against nature; […] on
the other hand, men leaving Asia to go to America went with the wind, put up a sail,
and developed ideas and Oriental philosophies in accord with the acceptance of nature.
These two tendencies met in America, producing a movement into the air, not
bound to the past, traditions, or whatever. (Cage 1980: 73)
It was thus in the United States that musical experimentation found a fertile terrain and almost
unwittingly tended towards Eastern conceptions of music. In an essay written a
decade previously, dealing with the convergence between Eastern and Western conceptions,
Cage specified five areas in which this tendency was made manifest: the
abandonment of construction based on motifs or themes, the poly-stratification of parts
without the need for harmonic control, the structural conception of rhythm, the use of
percussive sounds, and the interest in non-temperate scales. (Cage 1946: 111-115)
Elliott Carter, an American composer with a very different aesthetic, explained
during the Tokyo Conference that it was a characteristic trait of Western music that
composers were concerned with the ‘creation and vivid presentation of differing musical
characters and expressions’ (Carter 1961: 126). 5 In this pursuit of multiplicity and
specificity they had something in common with Eastern performers, who invent as they
improvise. Nonetheless this creative activity is not ‘caught in the chains of time’ and the
works can be seen as the result of a ‘choice from among many imagined improvisations’
(Carter 1961: 127). 6 This tendency to an increasing syntactic differentiation – which
4 In terms of the avant-garde I have tried to give an answer in Borio (2009).
5 Also in Carter (2008: 163).
6 Also in Carter (2008: 163-164).