Word: takemitsu
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Dates: during 1967-1967
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...keep hearing a great river of sound flowing around me," says Japanese Composer Toru Takemitsu, "like machines grinding away or air whooshing out of a ventilation duct, or voices of people talking with each other. As a composer, I merely dip my hands into this river and ascertain the meaning of whatever sounds I've fished from...
...catches have been fashioned into jazz pieces and film scores (Woman in the Dunes), but it is his avant-garde compositions that have made Takemitsu, at 37, Japan's leading exponent of a new, totally modern yet distinctly native musical style. He scored R I N G, a plaintive, murmuring piece for flute, lute and guitar, not with notes but with a diagram of a circle containing directional signals for time, dynamics and pitch. In Corona for Strings, he achieved wispy as well as grating effects by directing the instrumentalists to improvise on the basis of colored plastic disks...
Last week Takemitsu's latest piece, which had been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, received its world premiere in Manhattan under the assured baton of Seiji Ozawa. Confirming Ozawa's observation that Takemitsu "paints in watercolors," November Steps created a 23-minute mood of hushed mystery that was almost visual in its stunning impact. The strings whirred and chattered, spinning out a web of shimmering sonority into which the winds and brass poked tiny pin points, like stars among scudding clouds. Through it all one black-and-grey-robed soloist warbled the mournful, breathy tones...
...typical Takemitsu device to play off a standard Western orchestra against ancient, unusual Japanese instruments. Such traditional borrowings are his way of shaping what he scoops from his river of sound. Yet if the form still seemed elusive to the Philharmonic audience last week, that is apparently the way Takemitsu wants it. Not for him the lucid structure of a Beethoven Ninth Symphony. "It's a great architectural monument," he says, "but it's not my kind of music because it draws a distinction between man and nature. My music must represent efforts at becoming unified with nature...