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

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As Takehito Shimazu recalls:
Roberto Calabretto
In February 1956, the concert Audition for Musique Concrete and Electronic Music was
presented with the participation of members of Jikkenkb (Experimental Workshop). In
the same year, Tru Takemitsu (born 1930) composed a tape music piece, Vocalism A.I.,
commissioned by ShinNippon Hs (New Japan Broadcasting). Mayuzumi also
composed Variations on the Numerical Principle of 7 at NHK’s electronic music studio
in 1956. […] Electronic music was now recognized by the Japanese people as a new
field or style of music, aided by broadcasting and the mass media. Further developments
in broadcasting techniques contributed to the advancement of electronic music, which
resulted in the development of film music and sound effects. (Shimazu 1994: 103) 4
Tru Takemitsu was undoubtedly one of the protagonists of this new trend, not only thanks
to his enormous output but also, and above all, for the way in which he was able to give
expression to new musical typologies and create highly modern audiovisual situations.
Tru Takemitsu and the Japanese nouvelle vague
Some figures can illustrate Tru Takemitsu’s foremost position in the field of Japanese film
music. He was responsible for no less than 93 sound tracks for films covering a wide range
of genres made by all the leading protagonists of Japanese cinema, including Masaki
Kobayashi, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Masahiro Shinoda, Shhei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima and
Akira Kurosawa. He clearly contributed to revolutionising Japanese film music in the 1950s
by defining the various trends of the ‘nouvelle vague nippone en gestation’, as Max Tessier
put it (1985: 96). Many commentators have recognised and acclaimed his role, among
whom we can mention Howard Shore, the composer who worked for David Cronenberg,
and Aleksandr Sokurov, who paid tribute to Takemitsu’s accomplishment in using music
by the latter in the documentary Spiritual Voices (Dukhovnye golosa. Iz dnevnikov voyny.
Povestvovanie v pyati chastyakh, 1995).
In all Takemitsu worked in films for the best part of forty years, from 1955 to 1995; in
these crucial years for the history of Japanese cinema, he was the protagonist in many radical
changes. After a few early collaborations he began to make a name for himself
alongside the director Noboru Nakamura, creating the music for a lengthy succession of the
latter’s films over a decade. Then in the 1960s his production took a notable step forward,
4 Cf. also Loubet (1998). The convergence between electronic music and music written for the cinema is by no
means a merely Japanese phenomenon. One can think of the Experimental Electronic Music Studio in Moscow,
where Andreij Tarkovskij worked with his composer Edvard Artem’ev and, to a lesser degree, the Studio di
Fonologia, Milan, where Luciano Berio had also grasped the inherent potential of film music. In an article
dealing with ‘Musica per Tape Recorder’ he said: ‘It is only a short step from this to realising that this type of
music is particularly suited to providing a sound track for radio, television or film scripts’ (Berio 1953: 13).