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

Nature and the Art of Silence in Tru Takemitsu
Giangiorgio Pasqualotto
I wish to begin by illustrating the title of this essay. The ideas of nature and silence which
underlie the music of Takemitsu, as indeed that of other Japanese composers, are profoundly
different to what we might imagine. The concept of nature does not correspond to a
thing, to one enormous ‘object’ or agglomeration of objects outside or confronting the individual
as if it were an antagonist or a backcloth to be animated and exploited. Rather, nature
is seen as a horizon which includes us and surrounds us constantly; it is a sort of receptacle.
In fact the Japanese term for it, ‘mother’s village’, views it as a reality which encompasses
us before we are born, throughout our lifetime and after our death. Nature is much more
significant than the looming ‘wall’ we tend to visualise in the West, confronting us with
natural disasters. Moreover this is all bound up with the enormous problem of technology,
which I cannot go into here.
This very different conception of nature is evident in the teachings of Shint, the traditional
Japanese autochthonous religion. Commonly defined as ‘polytheistic naturalism’,
at the deepest level Shintoism represents an authentic adoration not only of the objects of
nature, meaning trees, earth, water, but also natural phenomena, such as the waterfall, often
framed by a tori or portal, constituting the sancta sanctorum in a temple. One can also
think of the configuration of the greatest Shintoist temples such as Ise or Izumo. 1
As for silence, I can recall the very important concept ma, which is none other than a
specific manifestation of a much more comprehensive silence. Ma is an interval between two
sounds, but it is like the tip of an iceberg which for all its diminutive size contains everything:
it represents the underlay of all the sounds and notes, the natural or man-made noises, which
we hear. Once again silence is not the opposite of sound or noise but rather the receptacle, the
matrix for all aural manifestations.
1 For centuries the major Shintoist temples have been built in the same way, entirely in wood and blending
harmoniously into nature so that the whole entity, the building and its natural environment, becomes the temple.