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

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
at that date was still absent in the Japanese potpourri of international music. There is no
doubt that the élan of French music, together with its language, played a major role in
Takemitsu’s production. What is more, this music sounded ‘modern’ in a way that the academic
output of the German school did not; in the period of Japan’s modernization,
German music had been chosen by the state officials charged with selecting Western
models to be imitated in the various cultural and social spheres. The first chair of
composition in the leading university music department in Japan had been assigned to a
composer grounded in ‘classical’ German studies. On the contrary, French music was
prized by the ‘national’ composers outside the academic establishment who sought to
combine Western musical language with their own sensibility and musical culture. One of
these composers, Fumio Hayasaka, was the inspiration and mentor for Takemitsu in the
early years of his career. In 1939 Hayasaka was engaged as a composer of sound tracks by
the major film studio Th, and Takemitsu briefly worked for him as assistant.
The post-war years in Japan were harsh and tragic, as we know from Kenji Mizoguchi’s
great films. For young people like Takemitsu it was liberty which was at a premium: liberty
of knowledge, of expression and of research. Many years later he was to say: ‘Music helped
me to be a free person’. 6 Takemitsu’s musical formation was strictly self-taught and free from
strictures: he listened avidly to every kind of music, studied the books and scores he came
across more or less by chance (in the cultural centre of the occupying forces, in a record shop
in Ginza which imported foreign records, from friends and so on). In 1949, when he was collaborating
with a range of artists on a musical event to mark the opening of an exhibition of
works by Picasso, he founded with others the group Jikkenkb (experimental laboratory)
involving some ten avant-garde musicians, artists, actors, poets and technicians, which had an
enormous influence on subsequent Japanese music and art (Tezuka 2005). The composers
Takemitsu, Ken’ichir Sat, Jji Yuasa and Kazuo Fukushima studied Japanese counterpoint
and aesthetics, Messiaen and Webern, and questioned their own sensibility in relation to the
Zeitgeist. In autonomy with respect to parallel experiences in Europe and America they and
other artists elaborated avant-garde languages linked to concrete music, atonality and the
amalgamation of different genres which coalesced in the creation of events uniting sound,
lighting and projected images, featuring some remarkable expedients at a time when technology
was still quite rudimental. In that period Takemitsu approached the contemporary sound
world with the same open-mindedness and, I would say, joy which he was subsequently to
display for the sounds of nature: in the late 1940s he was already talking of composing a piece
using the sound of the city’s undergrounds.
Liberty, above all. We can gain a better understanding of another key question, concerning
cultural affiliation, if we consider what I would call Takemitsu’s socio-historical
collocation. In 1960 Takemitsu joined other young artists (including Kenzabur e, Shintar
Ishihara, Shuntar Tanikawa, Hikaru Hayashi) in ANPO (Nichibei anzenpo shjyaku, U.S.-
6 Tru Takemitsu in a reply to Nishimura, Mainichi Shinbun, 8 January 1990, evening edition.
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