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

118
Luciana Galliano
pedantically ideological, if not indeed overtly reactionary and nationalistic. 2 The boy would
have been surrounded by a completely Japanese sound world in terms of the music people
listened to in private and used in such rites of passage as births, deaths and weddings, as
well as in the collective memory. However, in the streets and at public events, he was
confronted by a mixture of Japanese, American and European sounds and tendencies, the
first sonorities of the emerging mass society. 3
Throughout the war period Japan was inundated with music authorised by a specific
office, designed to arouse nationalistic sentiments, keep up morale and extol Japanese
military heroism while demonizing the enemy – a genre exploited by many composers
trained in the Western tradition, who produced scores for large-scale orchestras. The government
closed down modern music groups and above all the numerous bands playing jazz,
seen as the archetypal enemy music. There are police documents from the years 1941 and
1943 enacting the ban on ‘undesirable music’ and ‘getting rid of English and American
music’. One woman composer is known to have died from the treatment she received while
in prison. 4 Moreover in the thirties the government began to exercise a strict control over
education and state schools, and from February 1936 the Ministry of Education actively
exploited music as a means of domestic propaganda. The existing songs were replaced by
music redolent of nationalistic and patriotic sentiments: gunka (martial/battle songs), military
songs and marches – patriotic songs ousted the American songs that had been in vogue
like the melodies of Stephen Foster or children’s songs. Some gunka became popular; one
of them, Eikoku ty kantai kaimetsu (The Annihilation of the British Armada in the Orient),
composed by Yji Koseki in 1916 to words by Kikutaro Takahashi and resurrected on
the occasion of the sinking of the British cruiser “Prince of Wales” by the Japanese air force
in 1941, was a favourite of Takemitsu – paradoxically it was not warlike in character, and
had beautiful music (Ishida 2005: 123). 5 Koseki, whose father collected records, was an
important composer of film sound tracks, and Takemitsu himself was a film lover, going to
the cinema even two or three times in a week. He saw films as a ‘way out […] like obtaining
a visa for liberty’ (Richie 1997).
This then was the aural setting for the famous episode which occurred in 1944. Enrolled
in the army like all the boys of his age, he was put to work digging a network of
tunnels in the mountains to the west of Tokyo. An officer gathered these boy soldiers in his
room and by way of recreation let them hear music on a phonograph – allegedly using a
needle made by hand from a bamboo cane. Takemitsu was deeply struck, as he recounted in
later life, by a French song, Parlez moi d’amour by Lucienne Boyer, a musical genre which
2
On the particular post-modern condition of Japanese culture see Postmodernism and Japan (1989).
3
On Japan as a mass society see Ivy (1993); see also Harootunian (2000).
4
On Takako Yoshida and the persecutions see Puroretaria bungaku und (1990); see also Galliano
(2002: 118-121).
5
Yji Koseki (1909-1989) was the pupil of Meiro Sugawara, a conductor who had close contacts with
French music, and composed rykka (chansons), gunka, marches and sound tracks. Koseki was employed
by Nippon Columbia in 1930.