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!
