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

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
of sounds: the modes and their variants […]. But it is the garden that gives the ideas
form. (Takemitsu 1995: 119) 3
But I would also say ‘no’, and this for two reasons. First of all, this sleeve design would
not give a sufficient idea of the ‘Westernness’ of the music itself. It is true that Takemitsu
wrote many pieces under the influence of Japanese gardens, but their musical language – as
we have already seen – is not a ‘Japanese’ language: rather, it is the language of 20 th century
Western music. And secondly, this sleeve might suggest that Takemitsu’s approach to the
Japanese garden was a pictorial approach, almost programmatic in the 19 th century sense. I
do not think that Japanese gardens are present exactly in this way in these Takemitsu works.
For me it is rather a question of the appropriation of certain formal, almost abstract ideas from
the Japanese garden. The idea, for example, that the orchestra itself might function like a great
‘garden’, with groups of instruments distributed in space, as in the work Arc. Or – as in the
same piece – that that music of these groups might be played in different tempi, analogous to
the temporal cycles of the diverse elements present in the garden: stones, sand, trees, flowers.
Or that the structure of the entire work might resemble a Japanese garden, in which the same
‘musical objects’ – stones, flowers etc. – are viewed from ever new perspectives, as in many
works of the late years. In other words, in Takemitsu’s works certain formal aspects of the
Japanese garden are transformed into aspects of musical form. What we hear is not a picturesque
representation of a Japanese garden, but a musical translation of some of its formal
ideas. And the garden itself is visible, but not these ideas.
Perhaps, then, it is better to abandon the idea of representing this aspect of the composer’s
aesthetics in any visible manner? Perhaps, indeed, it is also equally difficult to
render other aspects of his sensibility visible? This is certainly true, for example, when
we attempt to describe a further aesthetic idea of the Japanese garden which Takemitsu
used, since it consists of a void. On a record sleeve, therefore, I think it would be really
difficult to depict. At the most, perhaps, it might be represented by the Chinese ideogram
for this concept: ma.
Literally ma signifies a ‘space’ or an ‘interval’, but the use of this term in the aesthetics
of traditional Japanese arts is very hard to grasp. Takemitsu himself had difficulty explaining
it. ‘Ma is not only a concept in time; it is at the same time very spatial, a spatial thing
[…]. Ma is perhaps… oh, ma is a very philosophical term’ (Burt 2001: 237). 4 We do not
have the time here to enter into a long investigation of this subject. But we can at least
make the observation that, in Takemitsu’s music, silence has a great importance, and that
certainly it is here that we find one of the expressions of the philosophy of ma in his
compositions. As Kenjiro Miyamoto says in his book on Takemitsu, the concept of ma signifies:
‘the […] metaphysical continuum of silence, that, in Japanese music, is consciously
integrated between the notes played’ (Miyamoto 1996: 150). And in reality this silence is:
3 Originally published in Takemitsu (1987).
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