The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Garden of Sound: Toru Takemitsu

by David Toop, 2005

For Toru Takemitsu, born in Tokyo in 1930, the old world of Japan carried a burden of hard, shameful memories: the war, the Emperor, the catastrophic trajectory of Japanese nationalism and militarism, a culture of enforced patriotism that repressed the consciences of many people. ‘Because of World War II,’ wrote Takemitsu, ‘the dislike of things Japanese continued for some time and was not easily wiped out. Indeed, I started as a composer by denying any “Japaneseness”?.’

During the war Takemitsu lived with an aunt who played the koto, yet traditional instruments such as the koto, biwa, shakuhachi, sho and futozao shamisen were almost as obscure and mysterious to him as they were to foreigners. A 19th century traveller named Isabella Bird described the shamisen as an ‘instrument of dismay’. For different reasons, Takemitsu took a similar view until he heard Gidayu-bushi, the hyper-intense, clattering music that accompanies Bunraku puppet theatre.

Takemitsu scored for biwa for the first time in his music for a film entitled Nippon no Monyo [Japanese Patterns]. Directed by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Association) documentary filmmaker Naoya Yoshida in 1962, this black and white short reveals strong mutual influences moving back and forth between film and music languages. The film explores Japanese visual aesthetics and the close correspondence between forms found in nature and their highly stylized representation and abstraction in designs found on clothing fabrics, lacquer ware, sliding screens and architecture. Chrysanthemums transform into overlapping semi-circles, a repeated sea of wave forms, then into water and bird flight. All of these mutations are echoed by electronic distortions of biwa, percussion and koto.

In the same year he used biwa in his score for director Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 film, Harakiri, then in 1964 for the ‘Hoichi the earless’ section of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan. In 1967 he composed November Steps for shakuhachi, biwa and orchestra, a landmark in confrontations between alien music systems and technologies, yet he continued to write about Japanese instruments in a tone that vacillated between awe, curiosity and frustration. From this ambivalence flowed the insights that led Takemitsu to create musique concrète without being aware of Pierre Schaeffer, then opened him to the Zen-inspired philosophy of John Cage.

Takemitsu was fascinated by the limitations of instruments such as the biwa, a loosely strung four-string lute fitted with only four or five frets and struck with a huge triangular plectrum. He speculated on the reason for such a huge plectrum and was led to the concept of sawari. With its loose strings and minimal fretting, the biwa defied quickness, melodic complexity or tonal purity. ‘The major characteristic that sets it apart from Western instruments,’ wrote Takemitsu, ‘is the active inclusion of noise in its sound, whereas Western instruments, in the process of development, sought to eliminate noise. It may sound contradictory to refer to “beautiful noise”, but the biwa is constructed to create such a sound.’

The large plectrum, like a sharpened hammer, is appropriate to the creation of ‘beautiful noise’. The entire instrument is difficult. The player must focus on single sounds, their subtle variations, the silence that precedes them, the decay of the note into nothingness. An examination of ma – the Japanese word signifying an interval in time and space – is essential to an understanding of biwa repertoire and the work of Takemitsu. As critic and writer Donald Richie says, interviewed for Charlotte Zwerin’s 1994 film biography Music for the Movies: Toru Takemitsu: ‘Emptiness is not there until something is in it.’ As for sawari, this describes a part of the neck of the biwa, then extends its multiple meanings into aesthetics by denoting touch, obstacle, even menstruation. ‘For me there is something symbolic about this,’ Takemitsu concluded. ‘The inconvenience is potentially creative.’

This sensitivity to the continuum of noise sound music silence might have drawn a less complex artist into conservatism, the lure of unspoiled nature, and tradition’s shadow world. But Takemitsu’s generation had been forced into political rebirth. Silences were a common feature of their films. Dissent was impossible during the war years, yet their silence was broken only by the devastating impact of two atomic bombs, explosions so far beyond any known experience that they eradicated normal human communications and rational speech.

As a Marxist, Kobayashi continually returned to anti-authoritarian themes in his films and Takemitsu searched for ways to reconcile the ubiquitous signs of modernity in post-war Japan with those elements from the past that could be retrieved from the taint of militarism. Takemitsu first looked to European composers for inspiration: Debussy, Ravel, Berg and Olivier Messiaen (described in an article entitled The Passing of Feldman, Nono and Messiaen as ‘my spiritual mentor’); later the more contemporary Americans: Cage and Feldman. Memorably, he described Feldman’s short-sightedness, his need to be close to the manuscript pages as he wrote; ‘Whenever I hear his music I think of its tactile quality, of his ears “hearing” the sounds.’

Although Takemitsu tends to be summed up, sometimes dismissed, as a composer of calm, beautiful music, one of his most important realisations came from the smell, the sweat and the noise of public transport. ‘One day in 1948 while riding a crowded subway,’ he wrote in A Personal Reflection, ‘I came up with the idea of mixing random noise with composed music. More precisely, it was then that I became aware that composing is giving meaning to that stream of sounds that penetrates the world we live in.’ Feeling isolated at that time, both from other composers and people in general, he experienced this epiphany as a potential release from the falseness in art. The urban soundscape led him to wish for a more direct relationship to the people around him. ‘It came to me as a revelation,’ he wrote. ‘Bring noise into the realm of organised music.’

In 1951 he co-founded the Experimental Workshop in Tokyo. The group, including composers Hiroyoshi Suzuki, Keijiro Sato and Joji Yuasa, would have been called Group Atom, but for understandable objections to the word ‘atom’ by one of the members. By 1955, NHK in Tokyo had founded its own recording studio, the same studio where Karlheinz Stockhausen later created Telemusik. Also in 1955, Takemitsu began composing tape and musique concrète pieces such as Vocalism-Ai; Relief Statique; Sky, Horse, and Death; and Water Music. The piercing aerial pitches and sudden percussive shocks of Sky, Horse, and Death made a link between the qualities of Japanese instruments such as hichiriki, sho, biwa and shakuhachi, and the radical new possibilities of transforming concrete sounds offered by magnetic tape and studio processing. Created for a radio drama in 1954, the piece is shamanistic in its imagery and intensity, anticipating Takemitsu’s work in cinema through the wildness of its dramatic movement and spatial contrasts, the mercurial sensations of realism that burst through a forest of otherworld sounds.

Not all of Takemitsu’s collaborations were deadly serious. Vocalism Ai was a magnetic piece for two voices, one male and one female, both repeating the Japanese word ai, or love, in a variety of intonations, speeds and pronunciations. The piece was used in a very cute, very 1960s animated film by Yoji Kuri. Yet emotion and the voice had the deepest possible significance for Takemitsu. As a 16 year old junior high school student, he was drafted to the mountains to help with the construction of a food distribution base. The war was in its final year and in those desperate times, only martial music and patriotic songs were allowed. One day, secretly, a student draftee played a record of a French chanson. Takemitsu was so moved by this moment of poetry that he decided, if the war should ever end, he would dedicate his life to composing music.

‘In performance,’ Takemitsu wrote, ‘sound transcends the realm of the personal. Now we can see how the master shakuhachi player, striving in performance to recreate the sound of wind in a decaying bamboo grove, reveals the Japanese sound ideal: sound, in its ultimate expressiveness, being constantly refined, approaches the nothingness of that wind in the bamboo grove.’

Takemitsu’s 1948 epiphany in the subway convinced him that contemporary music was self-enclosed within the systematic rigour of its own language. His incorporation of concrete sound and urban noise was an effort to reach out to people who heard these sounds as part of their daily lives. Although his concert music was delicately coloured, subtle, filled with challenges by its apparent lack of conventional form, his strongest film music was created for a cinema of violence, eroticism, cruelty, horror and emotional precipices. Working with many of the most interesting post-war directors in Japan – Nagisa Oshima, Masaki Kobayashi, Susumu Hani, Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, Kon Ichikawa, as well as Teshigahara – allowed him the opportunity to explore the dramatic impact of genre dislocations, anachronistic juxtapositions, stylistic borrowing, gorgeous melody, extreme noise, alienation and shock.

‘Toru Takemitsu was an avid film fan,’ Shinoda told me. Takemitsu scored a number of Shinoda’s films, including Samurai Spy (1965), Double Suicide (1969), The Petrified Forest (1973), Banished Orin (1977), and Gonza the Spearman (1986). ‘I heard him once say that he had seen as many as 300 films in one year. I believe what fascinated him most about film was his keen interest in the overlap of real sound and the soundtrack along the sequence of the film. The rustling of silk, footsteps, the opening of a shoji sliding door, and notes from musical instruments – they were all “music” for Takemitsu. Even before musical instruments make sound into “music”, there were sound sources, and such sound could turn into “music”, or turn into “film/images”. One of his utmost requests to me when I was shooting the film was to record every sound at a shooting site with the most scrupulous care.’

‘Why do I write film music?’ Takemitsu replied to interviewer Peter Grilli in Music for the Movies. ‘It’s because movies have erotic elements as well as violence. I don’t like things that are too pure and refined. I’m more interested in what’s real. And films are so full of life. Sometimes, working on a concert piece by myself, as the excess is gradually stripped away it becomes increasingly pure, but that is not really interesting. Something pure only becomes interesting when combined with something coarse. Writing music is like getting a passport – a visa to freedom, a liberty passport.’

Takemitsu described the form of his own music as a walk through a garden. In such a garden, the sudden appearance of Elvis Presley practicing karate beyond the fence would come as no surprise: just the shakkei principle of borrowed scenery in action. ‘I love gardens,’ he wrote. ‘They do not reject people. There one can walk freely, pause to view the entire garden, or gaze at a single tree. Plants, rocks, and sand show changes, constant changes.’ In other words, a sound work can be traversed, scanned through varying modes of perception, appreciated from different viewpoints and time frames. His perception of time and continuity in relation to musical form was a part of this, a recognition of time’s circularity. He admired the modalism of Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Gil Evans, citing George Russell’s tonal theories, his comparison of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane solos to the flow of the Mississippi River.

‘My music is something like a signal sent out to the unknown,’ he said. The sound gardens that he constructed could be sensual and calming, sparkling with firefly showers, vibrating with the vibrant greens of soft mosses, austere, geometrical and symbolic like the Kyoto dry gardens of Daisen-in, Zuiho-in and Ryogen-in. But all Japanese gardening is symbolic. Takemitsu knew this, knew also that the philosophical principles quietly governing the shaping of artificial nature could be applied to the shaping of sound. The results could be the same: a transformative ritual.

Many taboos constrained the design of an eleventh century garden. Takemitsu was a modern man who had felt the shock and ensuing silence of the atomic bomb. There were dark places within his sonic gardens, spirits lurking, ghosts of all the tragedies of the century, places of haunted weather. ‘My music is composed as if fragments were thrown together unstructured, as in dreams,’ he wrote. Grilli, writer and co-producer of Music for the Movies, has quoted Takemitsu’s last thoughts, written to friends a few days before his death in 1996: ‘Don’t worry about me. I will get a stronger body as a whale. And I want to swim in the ocean that has no west and no east.’