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

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Peter Burt
‘in no wise something void, but rather is filled with the numberless tones or noises of
space’ (Miyamoto 1996: 150). We have, then, discovered two aspects of Takemitsu’s
‘Japaneseness’: the use of the Japanese garden as a formal idea, and the philosophy of ma.
These two concepts also share an aspect in common: they are invisible, we cannot easily
represent them on the sleeve of a record. Have we perhaps discovered a model here? Are
there other examples in Takemitsu’s thought of a ‘Japaneseness’ which is equally invisible,
constructed of similar abstract aesthetic concepts?
Certainly, this is also true of his concept of sawari, like ma taken from traditional Japanese
aesthetics – and equally difficult to explain. In traditional music for shamisen (traditional
stringed instrument), sawari signifies a complex sound, rich in harmonics, which
is perceived as a sound near noise or unpitched sound. […] This complex sound is
called sawari in Japan. The word sawari comes from the verb sawaru in Japanese. If
translated into English, it means ‘touch’. Sawari relates to overtones […]. It is said
between players, ‘if a person can get a beautiful sawari, he or she might be a
master’. (Ono 2008: 70)
It is therefore a question of a timbral element, a sound produced by traditional instruments
which approaches noise. Where is it to be found, then, in Takemitsu’s music – written, for the
most part, for Western instruments? One possible answer is given by Ono in the same article,
with references to the many places in Takemitsu’s music where the sound dies away al
niente: ‘In such places, the act of listening to the sound is awakened in the performer and the
listener. We listen to the sound of reverberation […] until it gradually unites with the sound of
the natural environment surrounding us’ (Ono 2008: 73). And what allows us to hear these
ambient sounds, this sawari of nature? Yes indeed: it is the silence, the ma. Two of
Takemitsu’s most important aesthetic ideas thus stand in a complex reciprocal relationship to
one another.
Perhaps we are now able to attempt a reply to our first question – ‘How Japanese was
Takemitsu?’ We have seen that he was not Japanese in a ‘nationalist’ sense: because of
their unpleasant associations, he had no wish to use Japanese scales or popular songs.
Neither did he wish to attempt a ‘fusion’ of traditional Japanese music with Western
music, as is often claimed. But he certainly had a typically Japanese sensitivity towards
nature: above all for the formalism of the Japanese garden, from which he took formal
concepts for his own music. And he also took other abstract, invisible concepts from
traditional Japanese aesthetics: for example ma, sawari (there are also others). In sum,
then, his ‘Japaneseness’ was not of a picturesque, folkloristic or nationalist kind, but
refined, abstract – and without any trace of chauvinism. As, once again, Mitsuko Ono has
said: ‘However, the aesthetic is one led by radically considering sound, and not one led
from the concept of a national identity [Japan]’ (Ono 2008: 73). There remains, therefore,
4 Originally published in Takemitsu (1989: 212).