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

156
Giangiorgio Pasqualotto
which everything opens out onto the garden and the outside space. This was indeed absolutely
revolutionary, as the Bauhaus architects were quick to perceive.
This perspective – by which the empty background is never seen as a static or inert
reality but as the inexhaustible matrix of forms – can be recognised just as clearly in
poetry, and in particular in the haiku, where, as in the music of Takemitsu, the interrelationship
between underlying silence and ‘surface’ sound is fundamental. In its simplicity
the haiku manages to present the event in Nishida’s or Takemitsu’s perspective of pure
experience, without the intervention of a commentator. This interrelationship is communicated
with a particular and highly original efficacy through the use of linguistic terms
known as kireji, cutting words, such as ya, kana, kamo, keri, which have no specific
meaning but indicate a pause, a suspension, an ‘emptiness’ in the body of the poem. 7 In
haiku poetry linguistic formalization leads the imagination to conceive of something
which is not a complete representation, a ‘picture’, but rather the dissolution of the frame.
Take, for example, this haiku by Bash:
kane kiete the bell fades away,
hana no ka wa tsuku the blossoms’ fragrance ringing:
yube kana early evening – (Bash 2004: 32)
In the translation of these extraordinary lines, the suspension is indicated by the dash, but
the meaning is well caught in the verb ‘fade away’. The silence which follows on from
the sound of a bell is not absolute, but fraught with the gradual fading out of the bell’s
vibrations. This progressive fade away of the sound is what in fact connects the sound
itself with silence, in other words with what underlay it and gave it origin, just as it generates
every other sound, noise or musical note. There is no connotation of melancholy in
this ‘movement towards silence’, in spite of the typical Japanese stereotype of yearning
for the ephemeral. Instead, it is the attention to nuance of fading away, of transforming
itself, moving towards a background in the form of nature, silence or the blank sheet
which is truly Japanese.
In his music I believe Takemitsu pays particular attention to these links connecting
sounds to their silent underlay. It is surely not a coincidence if Takemitsu was
greatly interested in John Cage’s investigation of the dynamics of silence. In this
context I would recall the episode – recorded by Cage himself (1961: 8) – which occurred
at Harvard in 1951. Isolated in an anechoic chamber, Cage found that he was
hearing two sounds, one high-pitched and the other low. The sound technician told
him that he was hearing, respectively, the functioning of his own nervous system and
his blood circulating. Clearly this experience goes to dissolve the opposition between
sound and silence, demonstrating that there is in fact a tangible continuity between
7
Translations of this verse into Western languages tend to render these kireji (cut words) using dots or
brackets or a dash.