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

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Mitsuko Ono
painting and literature were not concerned about music, his essays still appealed to them.
There might be a few people who have acquired an interest in his music and come to listen
to it by reading his writings, but at the same time – and this saddened Takemitsu – there are
some people in Japan who have read his writings, but never listened to his music. I would
like at this point to describe the Japanese social background a little. I told you that
Takemitsu began to travel to and from Japan from 1964 onwards, but for ordinary Japanese,
it was only from the latter half of 1980s that they were able to go abroad freely.
After its defeat in 1945, Japan introduced a system of stable exchange rates, and the
dollar continued to be equal to 360 yen for about thirty years. A floating exchange rate system
was introduced in 1973, and from 1985 the yen began to appreciate in value, but before
this it was too expensive for an individual easily to travel to foreign countries. A person
who went abroad from 1964 onwards, therefore – like Takemitsu – represented for many
people in Japan a window on the rest of the world. Japanese readers of Takemitsu’s generation
were able, through his essays, to know about technologically advanced cities they had
never visited, such as New York and Paris, or were able to learn about the regional cultures
he experienced with Western composers as part of various projects – Balinese and Australian
Aboriginal – which were sometimes still referred to as ‘primitive’ at that time.
Takemitsu’s essays were written as though he was exercising his own creativity just for
his own amusement by describing what he saw and heard, not as reports for a third party.
Writings such as the correspondence with the cultural anthropologist Junz Kawada – who
researched the Mossi tribe in Africa, a society that has no written language – or those regarding
Takemitsu’s sensitivity to sound came to the attention of the brain scientist Bin
Kimura, a researcher into the functions of the left and right cerebral hemispheres.
Takemitsu’s conversations with such people in these magazines explained to a general
readership the idea that culture could be understood through sound.
I have just spoken of experts in, respectively, cultural anthropology and brain
science. Takemitsu himself had the reputation of being an ‘expert in conversation’. He
talked with Japanese novelists, poets, painters, film directors and so on, on the assumption
that these interviews would later be published in magazines. Moreover, Takemitsu
interviewed Xenakis, Cage, Heinz Holliger, Peter Serkin and Simon Rattle for various
magazines when they came to Japan. Through Takemitsu Japanese readers were able to
know what contemporary musicians were thinking or feeling.
Now let us turn our attention to the various magazines with which Takemitsu was
involved. In 1984 he served on the editorial committee of the magazine Hermes,
alongside five others: the architect Arata Isozaki, the novelist Kenzaburo e, the poet