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

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Angela Ida De Benedictis
I have known about John Cage for seven or eight years. I am very interested in his
thought, but his music – he has many different styles. But I think I cannot adopt his
style. Most important for Cage is his thought. His notations, no. [...]
When did you begin writing graphic scores?
Before Cage came. Old Japanese music had many graphs notation – like graph. My
graphic work, I think, is not my composition. My movement of spirit, design of my
mind, not sketch. (Lieberman 2002: 229)
We can perhaps recognise other influences typical of Cage in the pursuit of ‘silence’
which emerges unequivocally in the above-mentioned works and in subsequent ones, as
well as a vocation for the ‘liberation of sound’ from predefined temporal or structural
grids. These features have been amply discussed in works written on or by Takemitsu
which we can merely mention here before going on to review other forms of interplay
with the Western avant-gardes. 20
In his composition Relief Statique of 1955, Takemitsu had his first essay in electronic
experimentation as practised in the French musique concrète (the debt is clearly to Pierre
Schaeffer). 21 The techniques of recording, sampling and editing sounds and noises from
everyday life gave Takemitsu the possibility of manipulating – above all in film music –
sound materials which rather than belonging to the idiom of ‘artificial’ music (produced by
an instrument) were associated with ‘real’, ‘concrete’ material (present in nature). While
one can speak of the influence of Schaeffer – above all in the electronic works Takemitsu
composed up to the beginning of the 1960s (including Relief Statique and Sky, Horse and
Death) – this does not go beyond a functional use and the aim to ‘expand the possibilities of
sound material’. Takemitsu does not seem to have found in this type of experimentation the
sort of dynamism or pulsation of sound he was interested in. Unlike the French concrete
experimentations, in Takemitsu the aural material remains recognisable almost to the point
of ‘naturalism’. If Schaeffer treats ‘sound objects’ as ‘anecdote’, stripping them of their
natural connotations and transforming them in the pursuit of an abstract image by means of
concrete sounds, in Takemitsu they remain part of a soundscape which is not contaminated
by manipulations or transformations which risk altering their nature: he seeks to achieve a
concrete tribute by means of concrete sounds. But of course, these sounds are not employed
in the sense of an ‘imitation’ of nature: it is not a question of copying what exists in nature
20 See among others the above mentioned volume by Burt (2001), Ziad Kreidy’s study (2009), and what
Takemitsu (1995c; 1995d) had to say about Cage.
21 The person responsible for disseminating and mediating the European experimentation of electronic
techniques was Toshiro Mayuzumi, who returned to Japan in 1952 after a period studying in Paris, when he
gained first-hand experience of serial composition and musique concrète (cf. also Toop 2002: 2). We can
recall that in Makoto Moroi’s brief evocation of electronic music delivered to the “Tokyo East-West Music
Encounter Conference”, one of the very few examples given was a work by Takemitsu (Vocalism), compared
for its stylistic and linguistic innovation to Omaggio a Joyce by Luciano Berio (cf. Moroi 1961: 131).