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

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
Even if he had a lot of work overseas, he made Japan his base, and went to and fro
between Japan and foreign countries. Such was the stance that Takemitsu maintained. How
did average members of Japanese society view Takemitsu, who frequently went abroad and
yet lived in the land of his birth? I would like to examine two areas in which Takemitsu
exerted a strong influence on Japanese culture, besides composition. One was his involvement
in publication. The other was his activity as organiser of music festivals in Japan.
First of all, I will talk about the former. He was an essayist and expert interviewer, and
at the same time he was involved as a member of the editorial staff or supervisor of various
magazines, offering encouragement from behind the scenes. Eleven volumes of
Takemitsu’s essays, and eight collections of conversations, have been published in Japan.
There is a book called Confronting Silence which contains a selection of Takemitsu’s
writings (1995), but this is only a tiny fraction of his complete essays, translated into
English by Glenn Glasow and Yoshiko Kakudo.
The first occasion an essay of his appeared in a magazine was in 1951, when he was
twenty-one. After that, he wrote many essays for newspapers, magazines and exhibition
catalogues until his death. It was 1964 when he published his first book, at his own expense.
Kenzaburo e thought it was a wonderful book which should be published by a
major publisher, and he asked one of the editors who had taken charge of his own complete
edition to consider it. As a result it was published in 1971 by the long-established publishing
house Shinchsha, who had an extensive catalogue ranging from classics to
contemporary works. The English title is Confronting Silence, deriving from the essay in
which he says that silence is as important as sounds.
You may already know e as the novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in
1994, but at that time he was a close friend of Takemitsu and lived nearby – according to
e, it was a distance of only 200 paces – and they often talked together. These two people
influenced each other creatively: Takemitsu composed music after reading a novel by e,
while on the other hand, after listening to Takemitsu’s music, e wrote a short story. Rain
Tree for percussion, for example, was composed in such fashion.
In his essays Takemitsu wrote about subjects ranging from artistic matters such as music,
literature, painting, film and so on, to his travel experiences or the birth of his daughter
– all the things that he felt in his daily life. But he never wrote about the technique or theory
of a particular composition. He wrote about the entire culture with a wide-ranging point of
view and an acute sensibility. Takemitsu’s thinking extends to the cultural differences between
Japan and the countries he visited, the relationship between culture and natural
environment, the problem of modernity, and so on. He was therefore accepted by a broad
readership, not one limited to music fans. Even if the readers who were interested in film,
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