|
|
|
 |
|
|
TōRU TAKEMITSU/ 2009
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 2 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0117 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"I 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 it."
From Composers: In an Icy Forest, Time (Friday, Nov. 17, 1967)
-www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,844091,00.html
Tōru Takemitsu -
Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Though largely self-taught, Takemitsu is recognised for his skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, drawing from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.[1][2]
In 1958, he received international attention for his Requiem for strings (1957) which resulted in several commissions from across the world, and settled his reputation as the leading Japanese composer of the 20th century.[3] He was the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and honours; he composed over one hundred film scores[4][5] and about one hundred and thirty concert works[5] for ensembles of various sizes and combinations.[6] He also found time to write a detective novel and appeared frequently on Japanese television as a celebrity chef.[7]
In the foreword to a selection of Takemitsu's writings in English, conductor Seiji Ozawa writes: "I am very proud of my friend Tōru Takemitsu. He is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition."[8]
Influence of Cage; interest in traditional Japanese music:
During his time with Jikken Kōbō, Takemitsu came into contact with the experimental work of John Cage; but when the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi returned from his studies in America in 1961, he gave the first Japanese performance of Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. This left a "deep impression" on Takemitsu: he recalled the impact of hearing the work when writing an obituary for Cage, thirty-one years later.[16] This encouraged Takemitsu in his use of indeterminate procedures and graphic-score notation, for example in the graphic scores of Ring (1961), Corona for pianist(s) and Corona II for string(s) (both 1962). In these works each performer is presented with cards printed with coloured circular patterns which are freely arranged by the performer to create "the score".[17]
Although the immediate influence of Cage's procedures did not last in Takemitsu's music—Coral Island, for example for soprano and orchestra (1962) shows significant departures from indeterminate procedures partly as a result of Takemitsu's renewed interest in the music of Anton Webern—certain similarities between Cage's philosophies and Takemitsu's thought remained. For example, Cage's emphasis on timbres within individual sound-events, and his notion of silence "as plenum rather than vacuum", can be aligned with Takemitsu's interest in ma.[18] Furthermore, Cage's interest in Zen practice (through his contact with Zen Master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki) seems to have resulted in a renewed interest in the East in general, and ultimately alerted Takemitsu to the potential for incorporating elements drawn from Japanese traditional music into his composition:
I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage. The reason for this is that in my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being "Japanese", to avoid "Japanese" qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.[9]
For Takemitsu, as he explained later in a lecture in 1988, one performance of Japanese traditional music stood out:
One day I chanced to see a performance of the Bunraku puppet theater and was very surprised by it. It was in the tone quality, the timbre, of the futazao shamisen, the wide-necked shamisen used in Bunraku, that I first recognized the splendor of traditional Japanese music. I was very moved by it and I wondered why my attention had never been captured before by this Japanese music.[9]
Thereafter, he resolved to study all types of traditional Japanese music, paying special attention to the differences between the two very different musical traditions; in a diligent attempt to "bring forth the sensibilities of Japanese music that had always been within [him]...".[9] This was no easy task, since in the years following the war traditional music was largely overlooked and ignored: only one or two "masters" continued to keep their art alive, often meeting with public indifference. In conservatoria across the country, even students of traditional instruments were always required to learn the piano.[19]
From the early 1960s, Takemitsu began to make use of traditional Japanese instruments in his music, and even took up playing the biwa—an instrument he used in his score for the film Seppuku (1962).[2] In 1967, Takemitsu received a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to commemorate the orchestra's 125th anniversary, for which he wrote November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra. Initially, Takemitsu had great difficulty in uniting these instruments from such different musical cultures in one work.[9] Eclipse for biwa and shakuhachi (1966) illustrates Takemitsu's attempts to find a viable notational system for these instruments, which in normal circumstances neither sound together nor are used in works notated in any system of Western staff notation.[20]
The first performance of November Steps was given in 1967, under Seiji Ozawa. Despite the trials of writing such an ambitious work, Takemitsu maintained "that making the attempt was very worthwhile because what resulted somehow liberated music from a certain stagnation and brought to music something distinctly new and different".[9] The work was distributed widely in the West when it was coupled as the fourth side of an LP release of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony.[21]
In 1972, Takemitsu, accompanied by Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, and others, heard Balinese gamelan music in Bali. The experience influenced the composer on a largely philosophical and theological level. For those accompanying Takemitsu on the expedition (most of whom were French musicians), who "[...] could not keep their composure as I did before this music: it was too foreign for them to be able to assess the resulting discrepancies with their logic", the experience was without precedent. For Takemitsu, however, by now quite familiar with his own native musical tradition, there was a relationship between "the sounds of the gamelan, the tone of the kapachi, the unique scales and rhythms by which they are formed, and Japanese traditional music which had shaped such a large part of my sensitivity".[22] In his solo piano work For Away (written for Roger Woodward in 1973), a single, complex line is distributed between the pianist's hands, which reflects the interlocking patterns between the metallophones of a gamelan orchestra.[23]
A year later, Takemitsu returned to the instrumental combination of shakuhachi, biwa, and orchestra, in the less well known work Autumn (1973). The significance of this work is revealed in its far greater integration of the traditional Japanese instruments into the orchestral discourse; whereas in November Steps, the two contrasting instrumental ensembles perform largely in alternation, with only a few moments of contact. Takemitsu expressed this change in attitude:
But now my attitude is getting to be a little different, I think. Now my concern is mostly to find out what there is in common [...] Autumn was written after November Steps. I really wanted to do something which I hadn't done in November Steps, not to blend the instruments, but to integrate them.[24]
Notes and references:
1. ^ McKenzie, Don, "Review: [Untitled] Reviewed Work(s): To the Edge of Dream, for Guitar and Orchestra", Notes, 2nd Ser., vol. 46, no. 1. (Music Library Association, Sep., 1989), 230.
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Narazaki, Yoko (with Kanazawa Masakata). "Takemitsu, Toru", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 4 March 2007), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
3. ^ "Takemitsu, Toru", The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Ed. Michael Kennedy, (Oxford, 1996), Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press (accessed 16 March 2007) [1] (subscription access).
4. ^ Burt, Takemitsu's Works, "The Music of Toru Takemitsu", 277–280.
5. ^ a b Wilson, Charles, "Review: Peter Burt, The Music of Toru Takemitsu", Music Analysis, 23/i (Oxford: 2004), 130.
6. ^ Burton, Anthony, "Takemitsu, Tōru", The Oxford Companion to Music, Ed. Alison Latham, (Oxford University Press, 2002), Oxford Reference Online, (accessed 2 April 2007) [2] (subscription access).
7. ^ Burt, Peter (PDF). The Music of Toru Takemitsu. (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. http://assets.cambridge.org/97805210/26956/excerpt/9780521026956_excerpt.pdf.
8. ^ Takemitsu, Tōru, "Foreword", Confronting Silence, (California, 1995), vii
9. ^ a b c d e f g h i Takemitsu, Tōru, "Contemporary Music in Japan", Perspectives of New Music, vol. 27, no. 2, (Summer 1989), 3.
16. ^ Burt, 92.
17. ^ Burt, 94.
18. ^ See Burt, 96 and Takemitsu, "Afterword", 212.
19. ^ Smaldone, Edward, "Japanese and Western Confluences in Large-Scale Pitch Organization of Tōru Takemitsu's November Steps and Autumn", Perspectives of New Music, vol. 27 no.2 (Summer, 1989), 217.
20. ^ a b Burt, 112.
21. ^ Burt, 111.
22. ^ Takemitsu, Mirrors, 69–70.
23. ^ Burt, 128-9.
24. ^ Takemitsu, "Afterword", 210.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dru_Takemitsu
| | | send price request |
|
|
|
|
|
Gallery opening
500 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1820 (Between 42nd and 43rd)
...
|
|
more
|
|
