Living Contradictions The music of Toru Takemitsu

Music 22 December 2, 2009 Living Contradictions: The music of Toru Takemitsu Confronting silence by uttering a sound is nothing but verifying one’s own existence. —Toru Takemitsu (17) Page 490 of The Rest is Noise, (new revised edition!): …“The jazzy tinge is felt even in the immense sacred landscape of the piano cycle, Twenty Aspects of the Infant Jesus, written in 1944; one four-note motif in the tenth piece, depicting the 'spirit of joy,' sounds suspiciously like the jaunty four-note refrain of Gershwin's 'I Got Rhythm,' while the fifteenth, 'The Kiss of the Infant Jesus,' vaguely recalls the same composer's 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' Wagner, in Tristan and Parsifal, saw a fatal contradiction between body and spirit; Tristan and Isolde could complete their passion only in self-destruction, the Knights of the Grail could preserve themselves only by renouncing sex. Messiaen perceived no contradiction, indeed no difference, between the love of man and the love of God.” – Alex Ross Toru Takemitsu, a Japanese composer with many similarities to Messiaen besides a penchant for undercover Jazz, was similarly steeped in contradiction, though his method of dealing with the conflict of opposing ideas was not to deny it, but rather to wade deeper into its dynamic waters. In a sense, contradictions form the central truth of Takemitsu’s music. As a musical composer, he was interested in the expression of visual space; as a Japanese musician, he was raised in the Western musical tradition; as a creator of sound, he was drawn toward silence. His greatest contribution to 20th-century music was perhaps his way of living into these contradictions and making the space between apparently exclusive alternatives his own truth. On the contradiction inherent in the process of artistic collaboration, Takemitsu says, “I am not trying to eliminate that contradiction…. On the contrary, by experiencing stronger contradictions I hope to know reality. Is not the effort in reconciling differences the real exercise for life? Contradiction will result in movement, and that will make the air circulate” (Takemitsu 13-14). There was certainly plenty of circulation in the air surrounding Takemitsu’s musical formation. Takemitsu was born in Tokyo in 1930, but lived until the age of 7 in what was then Manchuria. His father was a great jazz lover, and so Takemitsu was brought up on such Western fare as “Kid Ory and his Creole Band.” Sent back to Tokyo to go to school, Takemitsu stayed with his aunt, a koto (traditional Japanese zither) teacher, and later said that these early associations with Japanese music were primarily negative—the war was going on, and “for some reason, [the Japanese music] never really appealed to me, never moved me” (Burt 22). In the post-war influx of Western, and particularly American culture, into Japan, Takemitsu had access to scores and radio broadcasts of such music as Gershwin, Debussy, Mahler, and Messaien. Many of these composers, especially Debussy and Messaien, were to strongly influence his later compositions; there was a circular exchange of ideas between the French and the Japanese traditions, since Debussy was influenced by the Japanese aesthetic and Takemitsu, initially uninterested in the Japanese tradition, was influenced by Debussy, among others. Takemitsu claims to have been inspired to compose by hearing a broadcast of the French composer Cesar Franck, in which he discovered a “second kind of music” different from the traditional Japanese and the popular Western music to which he had previously been exposed: “namely the instrumental, the absolute kind. In Japan, word and sound cannot be separated. But here I was hearing an instrument being played alone and awakening astonishing feelings in me…At that moment, I decided to become a composer” (Burt 23). Together with another aspiring composer, Takemitsu studied Rimsky-Korsakov’s Orchestration, and though he received some instruction from the Japanese composer Yasuji Kiyose, he considered himself “mainly self-taught”(Kakudo xi). The “Japanese” preoccupation with the inseparability of verbal and musical expression pervades both his musical and literary writing. For Takemitsu, words create “a kind of filter of my thoughts” prior to and concurrent with their expression through sound. “In order to be totally immersed in music,” he writes, “I cannot neglect verification of my relationship to the world through the use of words” (Takemitsu ix). But words to Takemitsu are not simply definitive. In a sense, the music becomes a part of the words’ meaning, and gives life to the specificity of their shell: “If words are never uttered as sound they can never transcend their limited capacity as designators” (Takemitsu 84). His many colorful titles to his primarily instrumental and non-verbal works point to this relationship: Such names as “A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden” (for orchestra, 1977), “Far calls. Coming, Far!” (violin and orchestra, 1980), and “Dream/Window” (orchestra, 1985), are typical. But he cautions that the names are far from arbitrary: To find an appropriate title for a composition I move back and forth between sound and words. Many of my titles are strange; some critics think they are simply the result of a poetic whim. But when I decide on a title, it is not merely to suggest a mood but a mark of the significance of the music and the problems encountered in its general construction. (Takemitsu 97) In the case of “A Flock Descends,” the title was taken from a dream. “Far calls…” is a quotation from the end of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Burt 194). Dream/Window, in the original Japanese, is pronounced the same as the name of the legendary Buddhist master of the Japanese garden, Muso [Soseki] (Burt 191), and thus introduces both an element of word-play (that is, of using the sound or “musical form” of the word to convey meaning) as well as formal and spatial associations with gardens. The line he drew between all modes of expression—verbal, visual, and musical— is very thin, if it existed other than as a path that he himself constantly explored. His writing is full of visual references—he wrote essays on the artists Jasper Johns, Odilon Redon, and Isamu Noguchi (who designed the set for Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring), as well as the dancer Merce Cunningham (the revivalist preacher in the same production) and musical composers such as John Cage. In 1951, he formed a group called Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), which brought together artists of various mediums—painting, ‘objects,’ ballet, music, and presentations of various combinations of the above—in an effort to expand the range of artistic expression through the presentation of these “organically interrelated” art forms in a non-traditional space (Kakudo xi). Such pieces as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire received Jikken Kobo performances (Burt 41), fitting in that the former explores the boundaries of musical time with visual space, and the latter the boundaries of song with verbal vocalization (sprechstimme). The ideals of his early multi-media explorations carry through into his more than 100 film scores. Perhaps the permeability of Takemitsu’s conception of the relation between sight and sound has something to do with the visual associations of the Japanese language. Many of the characters of the written language were originally derived from ideographs, and though much of this is now lost or hidden in more abstract symbology, the pictorial element in handwriting and calligraphy (Shodo) is still very much present. Shodo, literally “the way of the brush,” is viewed as an expression of the character of the individual as much as of the words themselves, and depends on rhythm and the order of strokes more than on conformity to a given shape (Fong 76). That is, a “good” work of calligraphy is not an accurate copy of an ideal, but rather a rendering of the individual’s essence through a given form. In a somewhat contradictory way, the highly prescribed manner of writing in which every Japanese schoolchild is drilled (for each of thousands of basic characters) allows for a freedom of expression impossible without the strong basis of the skeletal framework. (This idea of liberation through rigorous formality is seen also in the traditional tea ceremony, perhaps the most complicated and least relaxing way ever devised in which to relax with a cup of tea). The typewritten divorce of printed word from its method of expression—its visual (calligraphic) and aural (vocal) form—is what Takemitsu laments in what he calls the “Emaciated typefaces” that “echo empty screeching sounds” (Takemitsu 19), and perhaps what he seeks to remedy in his art. The process of calligraphy is similar to the process of musical performance, except that its finished product is a visual trace of a rhythmic performance, while a musician translates a visual score into aural performance. But whereas most Western music, at least in the “Germanic tradition,” follows the linear path of directed time, Takemitsu, especially in his later compositions, attempts to retain the curvatures of visual space in his music—an idea reminiscent of another highly stylized art form, the Japanese garden, in which the ideal is to be so carefully cultivated that the result is more natural than nature itself. For example, his 1963 composition entitled “Arc for Piano and Orchestra” is primarily divided not by sections of time, but of space: Each section of the orchestra (woodwinds, strings, brass, and percussion) represents a given formal component of a Japanese garden (Grass, trees, rocks, and earth), through which the solo piano (a person strolling through the garden) wends its shifting viewpoint. Each group proceeds at its own tempo, cued periodically by the pianist/conductor, so that “the piece is freed from a set frame,” becoming “a mobile strongly reminiscent of the Heian period [794-1185] handscroll painting” (95). This type of handscroll is associated with famous narratives such as the Tale of Genji (the world’s first “novel”) and religious legends, and, as its name suggests, depicts stories through pictures on long, hand-turnable scrolls. Thus, the temporal element of progression is left to the viewer, though a sort of visual “score” is provided. The concept of giving “mode and rhythm to individual parts like characters in a play,” Takemitsu says, “comes out of the tradition and musical spirit of Debussy and Messiaen” (Takemitsu 96). Ironically, it was another Westerner who turned Takemitsu on to the Japanese musical tradition—none other than John Cage. In the early 1960’s, Takemitsu was exposed to Cage’s music through a fellow Japanese composer who had studied in the US (Burt 92). Peter Burt suggests that it was from Cage that Takemitsu developed the idea of silence as “plenum rather than vacuum,” and of the conception of music as composed of qualities of timbre rather than primarily syntactical relations of notes (96). “Sound in Western music progresses horizontally,” writes Takemitsu. “But the sound of the shakuhachi [Japanese flute] rises vertically, like a tree” (87). The Japanese, he says, “did not develop such things as scales or rhythms but focused on the quality of individual instrumental sounds” (56)—an idea that resonates well with Cage’s compositions for prepared piano, a contraption with nuts, bolts, etc. shoved between the strings to create dramatically different timbres. But Takemitsu was not content to mirror what Cage saw in Japan, nor was he about to simply conform to a sense of the Japanese tradition. Although Takemitsu was interested in many of the same qualities of sound which Cage exploited in his music, especially this quality of “verticality,” the way in which he organized it was more fundamentally based in what he calls “the essence of human existence”—that is, selfexpression—than in Cage’s “philosophy of non-intentionality” (that sounds should express themselves, and not a superimposed human will) (Burt 97). It would be easy to see Takemitsu as a sort of coming-together of two traditions, of East and West, but that is precisely the opposite of what he intended. “Speaking from my own intuition,” Takemitsu writes, “rather than from a simple-minded resolution to blend Western and Japanese elements, I choose to confront those contradictions, even intensify them…That is my act of expression” (93). He often describes the relationships of East to West as analogous to that of many mirrors, and the once-enormous “Western mirror” as a now shattered reflection in which can be seen many other cultural mirrors (Takemitsu 92-93). Perhaps this points toward a location of the self in the fractures between image and reflection, freedom and definition, sound and word. On the 97th page of what could be read as an explanation of his philosophical approach to musical life, the universe, and everything, Toru Takemitsu flatly states that “Explanation is not necessary, since the music is there and speaks for itself.” One of the most fascinating explanations of his inexplicable compositional process involves the conception of the aforementioned piece for orchestra, “A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden.” Takemitsu describes the dream which inspired it as having been influenced by a photograph of Duchamp by Man Ray, in which the back of Duchamp’s head is shaved in the shape of a pentagonal star. The night after seeing that photo I dreamt of a pentagonal garden. Flying down and into that garden were countless white birds led by a single black bird… When I awoke, the landscape felt very musical, and I wanted to turn it into a composition. (Takemitsu 97) His choice of title (conceived in English, since the piece was written for an American orchestra), was “meant to suggest visual space.” Significantly, his first expression of the dream was through a picture he drew, in which the lone black bird is labeled “F# (fis-fix)” (98). The latter is a reference to the German spelling of the note as Fis and Takemitsu’s rather liberal pun on the English word “fix,” as in fixed drone (they sound a lot more similar with a strong Japanese accent…). In his musical rendering of his visual rendering of his dream, F# does form a fixed drone of sorts, and is central to the derivation of surrounding harmonic fields (103). (Incidentally, F# was supposed to have been Takemitsu’s favorite pitch because it is equidistant between the extremes of the octave C-C, and is also the outstanding note of the Lydian mode (in C, C D E F# G A B C). Modality in its more circular construction, as opposed to the directional majorminor scales, played a large role in his composition, hearkening back to Takemitsu’s early exposure to Jazz.) From the pitch F#, Takemitsu developed a collection of chords using manipulations of the pentatonic scale, representative of the number five or “pentagon” of his dream (Takemitsu 102). By laying out the “black-note” pentatonic scale as a framework on each note of which he arranges second-order black-note pentatonic scales, then taking the inversions of the lower two scales (C# and Eflat), and finally selecting the resultant “vertical” collections of pitches, he arrives at a set of outwardly chaotic or dissonant chords that are fundamentally unified (see below): Step 1: Intervals, given in semitones (i.e., M2=2; m3=3), of “Black-note” scale are laid out in a “magic square” for each possible starting point: C# 2 3 2 2 3 Eflat 3 2 2 3 2 F# 2 2 3 2 3 Aflat 2 3 2 3 2 Bflat 3 2 3 2 2 Step 2: Intervals used to form new, inverted scales on C#, Eflat, and F# (blacknote scale kept for Aflat and Bflat); resultant columns are new pitch collections (basis) Collection 1 2 3 4 5 C# 2 down=B 3=G# 2F# 2=E 3=C# Eflat 3 down=C 2=Bflat 2=G# 3=F 2Eflat F# 2 down=E 2=D 3=B 2=A 3=F# Aflat 2 up=Bflat 3=Dflat (C#) 2=Eflat 3=F# 2=Aflat Bflat 3=Dflat (C#) 2=Eflat 2=Aflat 2=Bflat 3=F# All of this sounds very mathematical and form-centric, even arbitrary (to base a composition on the abstract numerical manipulations of an incidental pun does not seem very conducive to what Takemitsu claimed as his ideal of personal expression), but Takemitsu was careful to note that his “interest in manipulating numbers is not directed at creating music theory…. On the contrary, … by means of numbers I want to see more clearly those unpredictable, formless images within me that, perhaps prepared over a long time, suddenly emerge from a dream.” He gives the example of the architectural plan of the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto, in which the numerical elements of design were developed into an instinctively graspable plan (Takemitsu 102). For Takemitsu, numbers become a sort of internal unification that allows for an expression of the unformed and perhaps indefinable element of dream and instinct. This pull between specificity and ambiguity—“dream” and “number”— is particularly apparent in the visual construction of Takemitsu’s scores, which range from the graphically vague to the meticulously precise (compare the scores for “Arc for Strings” and “How Slow the Wind”). It seems as if he is searching for a means of bypassing the “emaciated typefaces” of printed expression, a way to resolve the fluidity of thought with the concreteness of expression. In his essay on The Landscape of the Score, Takemitsu speculates that “One might add that music’s real essence is protected by the ambiguities of writing” (46). But how to reconcile this with, for example, the “subito poco fp > (tenuto) sul ponticello” which graces the first dotted quarter of vln 2’s second note in How Slow the Wind? Is this a strong internal skeleton, given which the musicians can perform brilliant feats of acrobatics? Or is it a constrictive exo-skeleton that makes their display exact but soulless? Takemitsu himself asks the question: “…the precisely notated contemporary score or the economical score by J.S. Bach—which of these might be a model of our complex universe?” (Takemitsu 46). Perhaps Takemitsu’s way of dealing with this question is simply to let it remain a question, one which he addresses continually in his various compositions but never resolves into a closed answer. As he says in reference to the question of the validity of a single correct interpretation of a piece of music, “The answer is yes and no.” Works Cited Burt, Peter. The Music of Toru Takemitsu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Fong, Wen C., Alfreda Murck, Shou-cjien Shih, Pao-chen Ch'en, and Jan Stuart. Images of the Mind: Selections from the Edward L. Elliott Family and John B. Elliott Collections of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1984. Kakudo, Yoshiko and Glenn Glasgow. Translator’s Preface. Confronting Silence. By Toru Takemitsu. Berkeley, CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995. Takemitsu, Toru. Confronting Silence. Berkeley, CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995.