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

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Angela Ida De Benedictis
If music can be divided up into two traditions, East versus West, a composer like Takemitsu
can hardly be expected to view these realities as a single entity or combine them in the
same perspective. In his music they always appear divided – more or less overtly – even
though each plays a major role and exerts a marked impact. However, rather than being in
opposition, these two worlds generate an ‘energy’ which arises from the interaction between
two different concepts of identity. In a conversation with Luigi Nono in 1987,
Takemitsu expressed clearly how he viewed the concept of identity and how this should act
as an inducement to become more receptive to others, not to exclude them:
Lately in Japan there has been a discussion concerning ‘national identity’. Let me tell
you what this is. It’s the idea that we are supposed to be different from other nations.
You may think that this idea is in contradiction with the trend towards homologation I
was speaking about before. But by considering ourselves like this, different from
others, and steadily withdrawing into ourselves as a nation, we shall end up by
excluding the others. If this is how things stand, then it’s the same as homologation: it
too is an undesirable phenomenon. (Nono 2001: 438)
In Takemitsu’s theoretical and artistic approach (as this can be inferred from his compositions
and writings existing in translation), it is precisely this receptivity towards others
which represents a means to achieving the universalism (or universality) of music, permitting,
that is, the creation of an artistic product which is intended for and available to
the whole of humanity, irrespective of national frontiers.
It is well known that Takemitsu was strongly influenced by some Western composers,
such as Debussy and Messiaen, whom he took as ‘models’ above all in his first period (up
to the end of the 1950s), when he seemed intent on turning his back on the culture of his
native land. But this reaching out to the West was promptly matched by the West feeding
into his cultural horizon. In fact in Takemitsu’s encounters with the Western avant-garde
one can perceive a kind of circularity, a two-way process in which the composer seems to
return to his origins precisely starting from the West (or perhaps from the influences which
his Eastern grounding made it possible to glimpse in the West). So that in this case, when
one speaks of relationships with the Western avant-gardes, one must imagine a single river
with two currents flowing through it: one flowing from Japan to the West and one arriving
in Japan from the West. It is a multi-faceted give and take in which it can be difficult to say
where one current ends and the other begins.
In the various books that have been published featuring Takemitsu, the chapter which
we might call From the West invariably starts out from the figure of Igor Stravinsky and the
admiration he expressed – which was to be so influential – for the young Japanese composer’s
Requiem. The year was 1959, when Takemitsu still had no claim in Japan to be a
representative figure of his generation (the Requiem itself, following its first performance in