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

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Luciana Galliano
Japan Mutual Security Treaty), a movement of young people and intellectuals opposed to the
renewal and militarist revision of the Japanese-American agreements (Packard 1966). This
movement took a stand against the deployment of any more American troops on Japanese
territory and also, especially after the war in Korea, any expansion of the American military
presence on Japanese soil. Its demonstrations were so violent that in late 1960 President Eisenhower
was obliged to cancel a visit to Japan for the signing of the treaty. A group of
ANPO intellectuals, including Takemitsu, formed the association Wakai Nihon no Kai (Association
of Young Japan).
The climate of social and artistic activism which characterised the decade is reflected
in the character of Takemitsu’s compositions. His poetical and musical sensibility was considerably
heightened; the 1960s were surely one of his most creative periods, when some of
his masterpieces saw the light of day. In this period Takemitsu found himself part of a
group of composers named Sakkyokkashdan, once again through Hayasaka, a group which
was responsible for the important experience of the “Sgetsu Contemporary Series”. The
Sgetsu cultural association was founded as a spontaneous expression of the joyful creativity
and munificence of the Teshigahara family, who had set up a modern school of ikebana.
The four sections of the association, inaugurated on 19 November 1958, featured cinema,
video and electronics, music, and theatre, as well as the ikebana school. In the first concert,
held the following summer, the pianist Takahiro Sonoda, recently returned from Berlin,
played pieces by Schönberg, Webern, Moroi, Yuasa and others on a red Bösendorfer designed
by Norbert Schlesinger. A subsequent concert in April 1960 featured two works by
Takemitsu, the electroacoustic Mizu no kyoku (Water Music) composed in the studios at
Sgetsu, and Sora, uma soshite shi (Sky, Horse and Death, 1957-8). 7 In the same concert
Hisao Kanze performed a noh dance staged by Teshigahara with lighting by Naotsugu Imai.
This noh dance, like the works by Mamiya Michio in another concert, the presence of a
giday musician, and indeed the coexistence with an art as profoundly traditional as ikebana,
albeit in a ‘modern’ version like that practised by Teshigahara, all point to a
definitive shift in status of traditional Japanese music and arts in the new cultural climate:
from being a totally separate, vaguely masonic realm, in the 1960s it became a living, fertile
reality. Once again a number of young artists from various backgrounds got together to
collaborate, and Takemitsu now found himself obliged to confront the artistic forms of his
own culture. In October 1961, after widening the horizon of the ‘traditional’ music he listened
to, he wrote:
7 In 1957, for a commission by the NHK and working in their studios, Takemitsu composed the piece of
concrete music Aru otoko no shi (Death of a man, the story of Billy the Kid, text by Shuntar Tanikawa).
He rewrote it in 1958, giving it the title Sora, uma soshite shi (Sky, Horse and Death). In 1960 this piece
was used by the group of experimental music Vortex in San Francisco, and also performed at the Sgetsu
Hall together with Quiet design. It was given once again in a concert in the first edition of the “Tokyo
Festival of Contemporary Music”.