The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

The Sound of Substance: Toru Takemitsu and Hiroshi Teshigahara

by David Toop, 2004

‘Every sound and silence in his music was drawn from our real life,’ said composer Mikako Mizuno, speaking of Toru Takemitsu. Nowhere is this more true than in Takemitsu’s sonic scores for the films of ceramics artist, ikebana master, and film director, Hiroshi Teshigahara.

This collaboration lasted from 1959 until 1991, with Takemitsu even appearing as a strategically placed ‘extra’ in The Face of Another (1966). In the scenes set in a German-style beer hall, underscored by jaunty accordion music, he can be seen in the background, smoking a cigarette, looking elegant and sharply intelligent, as always.

The music composed for these films was extremely diverse and often unexpected, ranging from harsh prepared piano scrapes and thuds, ravishingly pretty Fender Rhodes jazz piano and German drinking songs, to eerie drones, romantic strings, accordions, and even a Burt Bacharach influence. For The Ruined Map [The Man without a Map], Teshigahara’s 1968 film about the city as desert, samples of Elvis Presley’s I Need Your Love Tonight, torn in gouts of tortured noise out of a landscape of shuddering, groaning drones, are intercut by Takemitsu with Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in C Minor.

During his rich and varied life, Teshigahara had become head of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, founded by his father, and organised many events in Japan, including performances by John Cage and Merce Cunningham. At the Sogetsu Arts Centre in April 1960, Takemitsu played his tape piece, Water Music. Realised in that same year by Takemitsu and recording engineer Junosuke Okuyama, the piece electronically manipulates water sounds. As a verbal adjunct to the piece, Takemitsu explained that the sight and sound of flowing water made him think of Taoism, the Chinese system of thought described by Joseph Needham in Volume II of his Science and Civilisation in China as ‘a naturalistic pantheon, which emphasises the unity and spontaneity of the operations of Nature.’

‘I may have received some influence from Voltaire’s thought,’ Takemitsu added. ‘My image of Tao is not a continuous road but just dots.’ This is how the music sounds: particles of sound that knock and rub against a volume of emptiness. ‘For this occasion [at the Sogetsu Arts Centre], one of Teshigahara’s oldest friends, the Noh actor Hideo Kanze, was enlisted to dance, which as the critic Kuniharu Akiyama points out, was not so strange since the amplified sounds of dripping water came through like a Noh drum,’ wrote Dore Ashton in her book, The Delicate Thread: Teshigahara’s Life in Art.

Teshigahara projected the peculiarities of his scripts into the convergent sensuality of cinema, focussing microscopically on textures such as sand and skin, in Woman of the Dunes (1964), or steam and water in Rikyu (1989). Surfaces are eroticised; rationalism and the bureaucratic order of modern life are pitted against animism and the inexorable rhythms of nature, these transformations and oppositions echoed by Takemitsu’s granular, eerie musical scores of sudden distorted shocks and attenuated, fibrous tones: music as skin tones.

Teshigahara and Takemitsu move fluidly between abstraction and narrative, the multiple echoes of sound and image. The opening to Pitfall (1962) is typical of their radicalism. The film begins in absolute silence, suddenly broken by what sounds like a saw drawn quickly through wood (probably produced by friction inside a grand piano). As the titles flash onto the screen, the pace of this opening sequence increases, mirrored by a hectic passage played on harpsichord. Takemitsu’s approach is always sparse, never obvious. He punctuates a conversation with harpsichord and the thuds of prepared piano. Gradually we feel the despair of the miners, the danger, poverty, and exploitation inseparable from their work as the music ignores the surface realism of the images and delves into deeper meanings of a scene.

Music is also used sparingly in The Face of Another. When it comes, it is never what we expect, and even more shocking for being so pointedly used. A Japanese drum, struck in silence, punctuates a conversation; when the main character views his new mask in a mirror for the first time, the comic absurdity of his actions are revealed as disturbingly unbalanced by the music.

In 1998, I asked Teshigahara to note down some impressions of collaborating with Takemitsu.

‘In the jobs we worked together we never pre-arranged anything,’ he wrote. ‘At the rushes stage he looked at what I had shot very carefully until he collected all the sounds to complete the finished work. He spent all of the time with me. He checked not only his music but also meticulously checked the sounds recorded for the film – for example, the actor’s words and concrete sounds. There are so many different sounds in a film, but he checked every single one and would say, we can scrap this noise and hear music here, or vice versa. Also, we tried to mechanically process the concrete sounds.

‘For my films, he said it took him a long time to decide what type of sound we would have, or what type of instruments in some cases. For example, the sound of sand in Woman of the Dunes, or the mountain of coal in Pitfall. These films revolve around material elements more than narrative, so it was difficult to balance those elements with the use of actual sounds.

‘In Pitfall we made the sound with two prepared pianos against harpsichord, or in The Face of Another we used glass harmonica. To decide on the glass harmonica apparently took him a month but the process was enjoyable and once it was decided the composing went very smoothly.

‘With Rikyu he looked at the rushes very carefully and said there was no need to colour it with sound. I thought he might do just the minimum of cues but he ended up doing 24. I think he tried to execute it with simplicity. He used western antique instruments, like viola da gamba and portative organ. During the historical period in which Rikyu is set these instruments were believed to have been brought into Japan by missionaries and performed by them. So if that is true, Rikyu the tea master might have heard them, which is interesting.

‘Our first collaboration was my first documentary, José Torres. In 1959 I met an upcoming controversial boxer called José and I interviewed him for four days continuously. I was confident that I had captured everything about him but as I was so excited I wasn’t able to shoot it calmly and objectively. I was looking forward to having music added. I asked my editing team for ideas and Takemitsu was suggested. I had heard about him so I gathered my courage and spoke to him. He saw the rushes and took it on straightaway. He was very excited by it. The music is based around jazz and the popular feeling is that it was his major film score. He always denied it, but the music is full of lyricism and pathos. The sound flowing out of him had a good blues feeling. In that film, the sound of the boxing and the music blend into one. There’s no waste. It’s perfect.

‘I always trusted his work and expected new challenges. I think he expected the same from me. Of all contemporary composers I like his compositions the best and he knew that. Our friendship was always work-oriented but he came to see a performance of his works that I had organised after he had been in hospital. We worked together until very late over dinner and drinks and he showed a tremendous interest in all the projects we discussed. Most of my films used his music and his music had become a vital element of my work. I’m badly affected by the loss of my closest partner.

‘Takemitsu didn’t care about categories. He always responded to the beauty of music with great sensitivity. That’s why he was able to create his own world. He wrote with more freedom for his film music than he did for his normal compositions. His use of Elvis Presley and Vivaldi in The Ruined Map was one example. Also, the prepared pianos in Pitfall fits in very well with the rough scenery of the destroyed coal mine, the characters walking over coal lying in the road and feeling it underfoot.

‘He said that film music should be something that should neither explain the pictures nor accompany them. He used many different elements to provoke musical ideas and then matched the score to the pictures. He tried to create a self-contained world that ran parallel to the images yet fused them together. I felt at one with the way he worked. Our collaboration together was continually exciting.’

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See MoC #6 – The Face of Another (Teshigahara, 1966) for David Toop’s companion essay Garden of Sound: Toru Takemitsu.