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

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
And yet, in spite of this affirmation, there is no denying some influence of Cage in
Takemitsu’s music and compositional techniques. 15 One blatant example is the use of the
prepared piano, which Takemitsu adopted above all in music composed for the cinema.
Other scholars, including Ohtake, identify his most elaborate debt in the structure of
Dorian Horizon, which they see as having been inspired by the overall organization of
Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts (1949-50). There are in fact no other allusions to this
derivation, and those in question (which talk of Cage’s piece as a quartet for twenty four
strings placed so that only four can play together at any one time) 16 seem to be based on a
dubious reading of Cage’s quartet or, still in terms of conjecture, on a free interpretation
of the work heard in a local performance. The fact is that Dorian Horizon is overtly based
on modal scales (above all the lydian), and the clearest influence is surely the harmonic
theorising of the American jazz composer George Russell, the author of a book
Takemitsu knew well at the time he wrote his work, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal
Organisation for Improvisation. 17
Still in the domain of Cage, we cannot fail to cite the aleatoric techniques ‘à la Cage’
which Takemitsu used from the early 1960s onwards, prior that is to his meeting with the
American composer (1964). At that time Takemitsu had already been familiar with Cage’s
music for a long time. He had first heard some immediately after the War ‘through the intellectual
antennae of Shuzo [sic] Takiguchi and Kuniharu Akiyama’, and had been able to
appreciate it at close quarters in 1961 ‘when Ichiyanagi, on his return from a long stay in
America, performed a work of Cage’s in Osaka. I still feel the shock of hearing that piece’
(Takemitsu 1995c: 137). 18 It was in fact from 1961 onwards that Takemitsu created a sort
of trilogy which was entirely ‘aleatory’, entitled Ring (1961), Sacrifice (1962) and Valeria
(1965). 19 One might be tempted to recognise the influence of Cage in these aleatory scores,
were it not for Takemitsu’s insistence on distancing himself from this ‘model’. Instead he
referred specifically to his place in that Japanese tradition which up until now he had always
execrated. Moreover he engaged in subtle dichotomies between music and expression
of thought or ‘movement of spirit’. This is what he had to say concerning his graphic scores
in an interview with Fredric Lieberman given in 1964, the year he met Cage:
15 See on this topic Burt (2001: 92-109).
16 Cf. Ohtake (1993: 9).
17 Cf. Burt (2001: 86-87). A chapter dealing with Takemitsu and the influence of jazz is still to be written and
analysed. Takemitsu’s music is not lacking in allusions to Ellington, Coleman, Coltrane, Dixieland and New
Orleans-style jazz, which he had heard as a child in China.
18 Richard Toop suggests that Ichiyanagi was able to bring scores of Concert for Piano and Orchestra,
Fontana Mix and/or Cartridge Music back from America (cf. Toop 2002: 5).
19 In terms of many formal aspects and of ‘movement’, Ring also has elements in common with Boulez’s III
Sonate and Stockhausen’s Zyklus, although such identification remains at the level of intuition and cannot be
objectively demonstrated. To the titles cited in the text we should add the entirely graphic piece Corona for
pianist(s) of 1962, written in collaboration with the graphic designer Kohei Sugiura.
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