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

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
Heard gagaku at the Agency of the Imperial Household. I was really very struck by
the rising sounds that reach up to the sky like trees. If the sound waves of music oscillate
in the air, and necessarily exist in time, my impression is that gagaku is a
music which defies measured time. […] it does not generate an external time but reawakens
a latent internal rhythm […] Listening to the flow of sound it is possible to
conjure up the concept of transience […] In the pauses of a Noh play too there is
something that has to do with eternity. […] I have begun to think about a fundamental
creative approach to the negative space. (Takemitsu 1995: 6-8)
1961 also saw the first “East-West Music Encounter Conference”, organized by the International
Music Council of UNESCO and held in Tokyo from 17 to 23 April. It drew
many leading international figures: the musicologists Alain Danielou, Mantle Hood, Leo
Schrade, Hans H. Stuckenschmidt and the composers Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter, Lou
Harrison, Luciano Berio and also Iannis Xenakis, who became a great friend of
Takemitsu – and was very impressed by the antimilitarist demonstrations he witnessed.
One of the key questions in a consideration of Takemitsu’s style revolves around the
role of John Cage in helping Takemitsu to rediscover his roots. There can be no doubt that
their conversations were fundamental, above all in helping Takemitsu to conceptualise his
reappropriation of Japanese traditions; at the same time it is a fact that this development
was inevitable and already under way. Before meeting Cage in 1962, Takemitsu had already
reflected on the special conception of time in gagaku music; he had met Hisao Kanze
and may have discussed the idea of negative time with him, and had also made contact with
such traditional musicians as the biwa player Kyokush Hirata. 8 In fact Takemitsu already
had a range of notions concerning ‘music from his own tradition’, and Cage’s words of
wisdom would merely have confirmed him in his orientation.
Here then we have the overall background, with a few details which go to make the big
picture more lifelike and also to give a better understanding of Takemitsu’s composite and
fascinating personality. To quote Mark Slobin: ‘we have learned to think of groups and
nations as volatile, mutable social substances rather than as fixed units for instant analysis’
(Slobin 1993: X). In the contemporary world the concept of homogeneous cultural
identities has been lost to view, and with it the idea of a head-on clash between groups
representing different cultures. Takemitsu’s personality shares various ‘multiple identities’
of Japan and the West, making up what Amartya Sen refers to as a single complex entity.
Takemitsu belongs to a general, if somewhat generic, cultural community of contemporary
music and yet he is perfectly defined by the two expressions ‘Japanese composer’ and
8 On negative time see the chapter on time in Galliano (2002: 12-15); specifically Kunio Komparu, a great
interpreter of noh art, confirms that, ‘Noh is sometimes defined the art of ma’, where ‘the word ma is not
used to indicate something vaguely abstract but to indicate a definite negative time and negative space,
supplying both with dimensions and functions’ (Komparu 1983: 70-72).
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