TORU TAKEMITSU – [武満徹の作業] Works Of Toru Takemitsu - 4 (LP-1966)

Label: Victor ‎– VX-23

Series: Contemporary Music Of Japan – 4

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: Japan / Released: 1966

Style: Contemporary, Classical, Free Improvisation

Manufactured By – Victor Musical Industries, Inc.

Stereo-Orthophonic High Fidelity.  His Master's Voice.

Design – Kohei Sugiura

Photography By – Kiyoshi Otsuji

Engineer [Recording] – Takashi Watanabe

Producer – Jun Taki

Liner Notes – Kuniharu Akiyama

Translated By – George Saitô

Matrix / Runout (Side A runout, stamped): VX-23 – A / VLY 1063 122+ I OA GF

Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, stamped): VX-23 – B / VL Y 1064 152+

side 1:

A1 - Piano Distance ................................................................................................... 4:38

A2 - Pause Uninterrupted .......................................................................................... 7:50

        piano – Yuji Takahashi

A3 - Le Son Calligraphie No.1 for 8 strings ................................................................ 3:23

A4 - Le Son Calligraphie No.3 for 8 strings ................................................................ 2:37

        conductor – Hiroshi Wakasugi

        cello – Akiyoshi Kudo, Tadao Takahashi

        viola – Aya Tanaka, Junko Edo

        violin – Kenji Kobayashi, Mari Hirao, Miyuki Togawa, Namiko Umezu

side 2:

B - Eclipse For Shakuhachi And Biwa ...................................................................... 16:00

      biwa – Kinshi Tsuruta

      shakuhachi – Katsuya Yokoyama

Composer – Toru Takemitsu

Takemitsu's compositional journey is fascinating because his relationship with western music and his native musical traditions shows just how limiting are the categories of east and west when it comes to thinking about music's development in the 20th century.

Takemitsu's enthusiasm saw him investigate electro-acoustic music in his early 20s (this was roughly the same time that Pierre Schaeffer was doing a similar thing in Paris), which led him to compose music in an explicitly modernist idiom. He was crazy about the Viennese School composers at the time. An encounter with Stravinsky, who had heard his 1957 Requiem for Strings and taken the young composer out to lunch because he admired the piece so much, was one catalyst for his musical life.

Another of Takemitsu's influences was the music of John Cage in the early 60s. Takemitsu began to explore aspects of indeterminacy in his work (the improvised sections of From Me Flows What You Call Time, for example, are down to this approach – even if Takemitsu's controlled aleatoricism has more in common with Witold Lutosławski than Cage). But it was also thanks to Cage's Zen-inspired ideas about music and the world, Takemitsu explained, that "I came to recognise the value of my own tradition".

The other seismic moment for Takemitsu was seeing a performance of Bunraku puppet theatre and, a couple of decades after the war, opening his heart at last to the beauty of his homeland's musical traditions. "I got a shock … I suddenly recognised I was Japanese."

From the 60s on, Takemitsu's musical project would be to combine elements of Japanese music with the western modernism he loved so much. The blend is apparent in pieces such as November Steps, composed for biwa (the Japanese lute he studied intensively), shakuhachi and orchestra. The effect is more profound than a fuzzy fusion of styles; Takemitsu uses the timbre and texture of the two Japanese instruments to make the whole orchestra breathe and glow with gossamer lightness, something he continues in a later work for the same instruments called Autumn.

But the real substance of Takemitsu's Japanese heritage can't be reduced to an instrument, a colour or even a harmony. There's something more fundamental about his understanding of music; something that informs his work whether he's writing for solo piano, a film score for Akira Kurosawa (he wrote music for more than 100 movies), a string quartet or a concerto. It's something expressed by the Japanese word "ma", which suggests the concept of a void that isn't empty, an absence that is really a presence, a space between things that is full of energy. It's a principle that underpins Japanese gardens, with which Takemitsu often compared his music. "My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture." And yet it's also a way of thinking that is by no means exclusive to Takemitsu in contemporary music; it suggests the same circular, non-hierarchical sense of structure and time that composers from Anton Webern to Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti to Steve Reich have explored.
The idea of a meaningful void is worth keeping in mind when you're listening to music Takemitsu wrote in the last two decades of his life. His pieces are rarely long (From Me Flows What You Call Time is among the longest, at around half an hour), they are seldom fast and rarely overtly demonstrative – but they do weird things with time. Listen to his piano concerto, Riverrun (the title comes from Finnegan's Wake), or Quatrain (scored for clarinet, cello, violin, piano and orchestra) or his violin concerto Far Calls. Coming, Far! (another Joyce-inspired title), to experience what I mean. There's a lot to get to grips with in his output: as well as the catalogue of concert pieces, there are those film scores (start with Kurosawa's Ran), as well as music for radio, theatre and television.

Very subtle and specific music by the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

If you find it, buy this album!