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

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Peter Burt
But how did his French companions feel? It seems that they did not understand his reaction:
‘However, their reaction was not what I had expected. They thought it was beautiful, this
image of Mount Fuji. And they seemed to me to be totally incapable of understanding the
anger which had suddenly taken possession of me’ (Takemitsu 1971: 198). Whereas, I
believe, we however can understand it, this anger. Takemitsu – like Berio in our thought
experiment – felt insulted at seeing his music received in this way. Neither he, nor his
music, were ‘Japanese’ in this way.
Can we, however, say that Takemitsu was not in any way ‘Japanese’? No, obviously
this is not true either. He was never Japanese in a ‘nationalist’ sense, but he also said things
like these in his writings:
Naturally, as one growing up in Japan I could not be independent of my country’s
traditions. (Takemitsu 1995: 91)
Once I believed that to make music was to project myself onto an enormous mirror
that was called the West. Coming into contact with traditional Japanese music, I became
aware of the fact that there was another mirror. (Takemitsu 1992: 47)
So then, this is the reason why the first question I posed today was not simply ‘Is
Takemitsu Japanese?’, but rather ‘How Japanese is he?’.
To begin answering this question, it is perhaps useful first of all to view
Takemitsu in his own Japanese context. And, in order to understand this better, it is
perhaps also useful to make a comparison with the Italian context. In the case of the
latter, certainly, my sleeve design would not suit a record of Luciano Berio very well.
But we can imagine other Italian composers of the past for whom – perhaps not
exactly in this joking fashion – a cover such as this would be very suitable. I think,
for example, that the image of the Colosseum would not go too badly with Respighi’s
Feste romane or Pini di Roma.
There are certain parallels here with the Japanese context. That image of Fujiyama
which so offended Takemitsu might suit certain Japanese composers very well – composers,
particularly from the pre-war period, of picturesque, nationalistic, or folkloristic
tendencies. It is not entirely unknown in the West, this music. It can be found, for
example, in the soundtracks of certain films, such as Godzilla (music by Akira Ifukube);
and it seems that certain recordings on the ‘Naxos’ label of highly folkloristic pieces,
issued as part of their series of Japanese composers, are also very popular. Clearly, then,
Takemitsu’s music is not ‘Japanese’ in this way. And perhaps one of the causes of his
anger in the record shop was the implicit assumption that he himself might belong to such
a ‘nationalist’ movement – an implication which made him angry not just for aesthetic
reasons, but also for political reasons: