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

164
Angela Ida De Benedictis
Messiaen’s influence. 12 The solo instruments are in fact those used by Messiaen in the
Quatuor pour la fin du temps, namely clarinet, violin, violoncello and piano. The genesis
of the work was closely linked to a visit Takemitsu made to Messiaen in New York before
starting work on the piece, when Messiaen was particularly generous with advice
and details arising from the analysis of his own quartet. 13 The decision to accompany the
instrumental quartet with orchestra derived from Takemitsu’s impressions during those
sessions of analysis:
When he played the piano as he discussed his instrumentation, it sounded like an orchestra.
Each of his fingers seemed to make a different instrumental sound. Among
the many things I learned from his music, the concept and experience of color and
the form of time will be unforgettable. (Takemitsu 1995b: 141)
In terms of interplay, there is no doubt that Takemitsu’s closest relationship with a composer
of the Western avant-garde was that with John Cage. Here too there was a
reciprocal give and take in which the currents flowing between East and West intersect
and become indistinguishable. ‘From Cage’, as Takemitsu put it in a heartfelt commemoration
written in 1992, ‘I learned life, or I should say, how to live and the fact that music
is not removed from life’ (Takemitsu 1995c: 138). 14 In ‘Contemporary Music in Japan’
Takemitsu goes so far as to state that it was Cage he had to thank for being ‘taken back’
to Japan and rediscovering the value of Japanese tradition and philosophy, after a period
in which he had rejected his own culture:
I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage. The reason for this is that in
my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese’,
to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage
that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition. (Takemitsu 1989a: 199)
The two met during a visit by Cage to Japan in the early 1960s. Cage was invited by the
Sgetsu Art Center in 1962 and again in 1964, and Takemitsu specifically dated their first
meeting to this second visit:
I and John have been great friends since 1964. We spent a whole three weeks together
in Hawaii. I am a pupil of Cage when it comes to mushrooms! I do not in any
sense do the same things as John Cage. In a certain sense my music can be the antithesis
of his. (Nono 2001: 442-443)
12 On this topic cf. also Shlomowitz (2002: 177-191).
13 Cf. in this respect Ohtake (1993: 8).
14 See also what Takemitsu (1995d: 27-31) had to say in John Cage.