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Tru Takemitsu’s Aesthetic and Compositional Approach:
Music and Gardens
Luciana Galliano
Tru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on 8 October 1930, and his childhood and adolescence
were spent in a truly tormented period: before he was a year old Japan invaded
Manchuria, where his family soon moved to; and when he returned to Japan aged 7, the
country had just witnessed a major attempt at a coup d’état by army officers and nationalists.
Although they had failed to occupy the positions of power, the army and rightwing
forces were acting outside parliamentary control, and war had been declared on China. 1
Thus Takemitsu grew up in a country at war, subjected to a massive nationalist propaganda,
after which he lived through all the poverty and squalor of the post-war period. In
a word, Takemitsu undoubtedly belongs to that generation whose youth was engulfed by
the incomprehensible horror of the Second World War, and who wished to free themselves
completely of any association with the events and mentality which had
characterised that débâcle. In this he was in the same company as Stockhausen, Berio,
Boulez and Nono: they all nurtured the same sentiments, had the same reasons to wish for
a ‘new start’, and shared the same yearning for a profoundly utopian renewal. However,
the fact that Takemitsu was brought up in Japan made for many fundamental differences,
above all in terms of their respective soundscapes. Inevitably we are dealing with widely
differing cultural and philosophical contexts, but here I shall merely give a brief outline
of his musical panorama.
It is the soundscape, together with the fundamental conception and perception of
sound, which in essence goes to make up a composer, more than the curriculum of studies.
The soundscape Takemitsu grew up in was in a certain sense already postmodern, by which
I mean highly varied and lacking in a historical rationale or grounding (Clifford – Marcus
1986: 194): first China and its sound world, then school in Japan, where pupils learnt songs
whose tunes and harmony were fundamentally Western, but with words which were
1 The attempted coup in February 1936 and the subsequent outbreak of war with China in 1937 are
comprehensively described in all the histories of modern Japan (Beasley 1967, Gatti 2002, Sansom 1931, etc.).