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

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Roberto Calabretto
standard ones, as commentators have always recognised. If, on one hand, the identity of the
original sounds is no way diminished, on the other they are stripped of any realistic vocation,
becoming perfectly suited to the mysterious and oneiric character of these stories. 45
Let us look at the beginning of the first episode, The Long Black Hair.
As the camera reaches the large wooden doors to their property, they magically open
by themselves. The camera then cranes up and over the doorway’s arch, rides into the
front gardens, and sweeps the expanse of long grass toward the front porch of the
house. This is a profound gesture toward the relationship between the motion mechanics
of the camera as ghostly narrator, and its disconnection from the material
world that it photographs and captures. (Brophy 2007: 147)
The ‘chemistry of soundscapes’, as Walter Murch put it, ‘is misterious and not easy to predict
in advance’: in the final mixing the various components often form unforeseen
configurations (Ondaatje 2002: 245). This is particularly true of Takemitsu’s sound tracks,
to such an extent that music, noise, sound effects and voices come to lose their identity,
giving rise to new audiovisual experiences. Sound effects may receive an electronic treatment,
or a musical arrangement; music describing natural phenomena, such as a
snowstorm, may derive from an electronic metamorphosis of the sounds of a shakuhachi or
singing played in slow motion. In Kwaidan this particular approach to mixing becomes a
clear stylistic marker. Speaking of this film’s sound track, Kim Newman commented: ‘The
soundtrack is especially strong, mixing natural sounds, human noises and Takemitsu Tru’s
subtle, haunting score’ (Newman 2006: 88).
In the third episode, the bloody battle narrated by the blind Hoichi (Arrn 1979), the
music replaces all sound effects, with the extraordinary sound and resonance of the biwa
heightening the effect of the images as arrows rain down on the adversaries. Similarly, in
the first episode, the cries of the samurai who, having made up his mind to return to the
wife he had abandoned, discovers her mummified corpse, are eliminated and replaced by a
long, disjointed monody made up of the brusque noise of pieces of wood being broken up. 46
In Susa no Onna too, when the young entomologist is wandering around in the dunes collecting
samples, we do not hear the noise of the wind but instead music, in this case a
blanket of electronic sonorities and the sounds of a clarinet, while the final storm is accompanied
by an extraordinary effect of electronic and naturalistic sounds. In the celebrated
fratricidal battle in Ran by Kurosawa, quite devoid of the usual soundtrack of charges and
45 This approach is different and in some ways complementary to that of Michelangelo Antonioni, who in the
celebrated final sequence of Eclisse (1962) founded a new audiovisual grammar. The extreme realism with
which the noises are isolated led paradoxically to hyper-realism and inaugurated a process of abstraction. In
this way the material takes on a ‘concrete’ status and invites a ‘écoute réduit’ in Schaeffer’s famous
definition. Cf. Calabretto (2005).
46 In this tale the moments in which the samurai is seen living with his second wife are constantly interrupted
by certain ‘acoustic subjects’ as he thinks back to his past life and happiness.