Toru Takemitsu

Tōru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on October 8, 1930; a month later his family moved to Dalian in the Chinese province then known as Manchuria, where his father was working. He returned to Japan to attend elementary school, but his education was cut short by military conscription in 1944.

During the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan, Takemitsu worked for the U.S. Armed Forces, but was unwell for a long period. Hospitalised & bed-ridden, he took the opportunity to listen to as much Western music as he could on the U.S. Armed Forces network.

Despite his almost complete lack of musical training, & taking inspiration from what little Western music he had heard, Takemitsu began to compose in earnest at the age of 16.

Though he studied briefly with Yasuji Kiyose beginning in 1948, Takemitsu remained largely self-taught throughout his musical career.

In 1951 Takemitsu was one of the founding members of the anti-academic Jikken Kōbō ("experimental workshop").

In the late 1950s a stroke of luck brought Takemitsu international attention: his Requiem for string orchestra (1957) was heard by Igor Stravinsky.

Although the immediate influence of Cage's procedures did not last in Takemitsu's music, certain similarities between Cage's philosophies & Takemitsu's thought remained.

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 & 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.

Thereafter, he resolved to study all types of traditional Japanese music, paying special attention to the differences between the two very different musical traditions.

From the early 1960s, Takemitsu began to make use of traditional Japanese instruments in his music, & even took up playing the biwa—an instrument he used in his score for the film Seppuku (1962).

In 1972, Takemitsu, accompanied by Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, & others, went to hear Balinese gamelan music in Bali.

Takemitsu's words here highlight his changing stylistic trends from the late 1970s into the 1980s, which have been described as "an increased use of diatonic material [... with] references to tertian harmony & jazz voicing", which do not, however, project a sense of "large-scale tonality".

Takemitsu's sensitivity to instrumental & orchestral timbre can be heard throughout his work, & is often made apparent by the unusual instrumental combinations he specified.

Takemitsu summed up his initial aversion to Japanese (& all non-Western) traditional musical forms in his own words: "There may be folk music with strength & beauty, but I cannot be completely honest in this kind of music. I want a more active relationship to the present.

Nevertheless, Takemitsu incorporated some idiomatic elements of Japanese music in his very earliest works, perhaps unconsciously.

Other Japanese characteristics, including the further use of traditional pentatonic scales, continued to crop up elsewhere in his early works.

When, from the early 1960s, Takemitsu began to "consciously apprehend" the sounds of traditional Japanese music, he found that his creative process, "the logic of my compositional thought[,] was torn apart", & nevertheless, "hogaku [traditional Japanese music ...] seized my heart & refuses to release it".

The influence of Olivier Messiaen on Takemitsu is already apparent in some of Takemitsu's earliest published works. By the time he composed Lento in Due Movimenti, (1950), Takemitsu had already come into possession of a copy of Messiaen's 8 Préludes (through Toshi Ichiyanagi), & the influence of Messiaen is clearly visible in the work, in the use of modes, the suspension of regular metre, & sensitivity to timbre.

Takemitsu frequently expressed his indebtedness to Claude Debussy, referring to the French composer as his "great mentor".

For Takemitsu, Debussy's "greatest contribution was his unique orchestration which emphasizes colour, light & shadow [...] the orchestration of Debussy has many musical focuses."

Takemitsu's contribution to film music was considerable; in under 40 years he composed music for over 100 films, some of which were written for purely financial reasons (such as those written for Noboru Nakamura). However, as the composer attained financial independence, he grew more selective, often reading whole scripts before agreeing to compose the music, & later surveying the action on set, "breathing the atmosphere" whilst conceiving his musical ideas.