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

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Angela Ida De Benedictis
During the occupation in the immediate post-war years the American army set up the
Center for Information and Education in Tokyo. In a chapter of his ‘Contemporary Music
in Japan’ Takemitsu told how he often used to go there in the late 1940s in order to study
the scores of music composed in America (1989a). Moreover he was able to listen to a lot
of that music thanks to an American radio station, the WVTR. The composers he mentions
are Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and George Gershwin, and
he tells how he gradually came ‘to develop a sense of my own musical taste’. 6 Among the
works he listened to at that time – all of them representing something ‘rare, unknown, so
wonderful’ – it was precisely the music of Copland which made a particular impression: ‘I
loved Aaron Copland’s Violin Sonata. I thought at that time, oh, this is American Mozart –
very simple, but very well done. I knew American music first, before I knew Schoenberg or
Webern, because, after the war, we had no way of hearing new music’ (Takemitsu 1989b:
207). 7 The name of Anton Webern takes us back to the Second Viennese School, which
Takemitsu explored in the so-called ‘second phase’ of his career, coinciding with his return
to or discovery of traditional Japanese music. 8 It is still not clear exactly when Takemitsu
first came into contact with Webern’s output. 9 What we can say for certain is that the use of
contrapuntal forms and mirroring devices – clearly deriving from Webern – characterises a
large part of the compositions written in the period going from 1957 up until Piano Distance
in 1961 and Arc in 1963. However, his interest in the Second Viennese School seems
to have stopped at the formal aspect: he categorically rejected its structural organization of
pitches according to the dodecaphonic system. In 1971 he even went so far as to declare:
The twelve-tone method of composition may be the result of historical necessity, but
it presents some very dangerous aspects. The mathematical and geometric pursuit of
sound apparent in this technique is purely an intellectual act. It can result in the
same weaknesses as those that arise in any overspecialized aesthetic purity. It carries
with it the danger of hardening perceptions, and it is the perceptions that are the basic
elements in creativity. (Takemitsu 1995a: 80)
This is undoubtedly an important assertion, and yet it reveals a profound misunderstanding
of the dodecaphonic method which would require a much more thoroughgoing
consideration than is possible here.
6 Cf. Takemitsu (1989a: 200). For the names of the composers mentioned cf. also Takemitsu (1989b: 207).
7 In the same conversation Takemitsu also makes the significant statement that his idea of European music
was indeed mediated by American culture.
8 On the ‘phases’ of Takemitsu’s artistic biography see Miyamoto (1996) and Burt (2001).
9 In the conversation with Cronin and Tann (cf. note 7) Takemitsu (1989b: 207) stated generically ‘I was very
influenced by the Viennese School, and also by Debussy’, without giving any specific dates or titles. We
should bear in mind that immediately after the War Yoritsune Matsudaira had been one of the first in Japan to
introduce into his own music elements of the twelve tone method, effecting a hybrid with the musical theory
of the gagaku (cf. Bekku 1961: 95).