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

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
However, what could it have been, that feeling of shame which overcame me? It is difficult
to analyse my feelings at that time, but it was not necessarily caused only by my
exasperation at finding that my music had been received like some kind of exotic charm
in which ‘Fujiyama’ and ‘geisha’ appear. Yet this sudden, unexpected sighting of Fuji
had disturbed me. Although I am not particularly conscious of it, inside me Fuji has two
different forms. One of them resides in beautiful natural scenery; the other in the place
where my shame is situated. This last is not necessarily ‘Fuji’. It is rather that thing
called ‘nation’, which Fuji symbolises. It is ‘Japan’. (Takemitsu 1971: 198)
The key to understanding this hatred of the idea of being associated with nationalist culture
is, of course, Takemitsu’s experience of the Second World War. Like many Japanese people
of his generation, Takemitsu too had ‘a kind of gut-level response that whatever was
Japanese should be rejected’ (Burt 2001: 23). 1 Instead, young composers turned to European
or American models; like their counterparts in devastated Germany, they too wanted
to return to a Nullstunde. Almost all of Takemitsu’s music, therefore, lacks – almost pointedly
– the typical markers of Japanese ‘nationalist’ music: Japanese scales, popular
melodies: ‘I don’t like to use Japanese tunes as material. No power… no development.
Japanese tunes are like Fuji – beautiful, but perfectly eternal’ (Burt 2001: 236). 2 I said ‘almost
all’ his music – and certainly, it is not completely true that Takemitsu avoided
anything that smacked of Japanese nationalist music. For example, it seems that the young
Takemitsu wrote some pieces in which he experimented with traditional Japanese scales.
Officially, according to the composer’s own words, these no longer exist: he declared that
he was so disturbed to find elements of this kind in his work Kakehi that, in consequence,
he destroyed the piece. But he did not succeed in eradicating all evidence of his juvenile
sympathies for these sounds of nationalist character. One of the pieces which Takemitsu
wrote while studying with a composer of ‘nationalist’ sympathies, Yasuji Kiyose, was published
after his death: the Romance of 1947. This piece gives us the briefest of glimpses of
Takemitsu’s juvenile ‘Japaneseness’, which later he so emphatically repudiated.
But the mature Takemitsu was not ‘Japanese’ in this manner, and the record
sleeve with the picture of Mount Fuji does not suit him. However, as we have seen,
he is nevertheless in some way Japanese – therefore, would perhaps a sleeve with
other Japanese images be suitable? For example, despite his juvenile aversion for
Japanese music, we know from the quotation cited earlier that, later on, he rediscovered
traditional music as a new ‘mirror’. So many of those familiar with his music
might say something like: ‘One of Takemitsu’s most celebrated works is November
Steps, a sort of concerto for shakuhachi (traditional Japanese flute), biwa (traditional
Japanese lute) and symphony orchestra. Certainly, in this piece he did not attempt to
use Japanese scales or melodies; but, instead, attempted a kind of fusion between
1 Originally published in Katoka (1979: 58-59).
2 Takemitsu, cit. in Lieberman (1963: 143).
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