Toru Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu
(b Tokyo, 8 Oct 1930; d Tokyo, 20 Feb 1996). Japanese composer. A month after his birth he was taken to China, where his father was working.

In 1938 he returned to Japan to attend elementary school, but his formal education was interrupted by conscription in 1944. It was during his military service that he had his first encounter with Western music, which had been banned in Japan during the war; a military officer played a gramophone recording of the French chanson Parlez-moi d'amour to him and a group of fellow-conscripts. The song left a deep impression, and when, after the war, Takemitsu was employed at an American military base, he took the opportunity to listen to a good deal of Western music on the radio network set up for the US armed forces. At the age of 16 he decided, notwithstanding his lack of musical training, to take up composition. He received intermittent instruction with Kiyose from 1948, but was otherwise essentially self-taught.

Early on he identified Debussy as a mentor, and his fellow-composer Ichiyanagi introduced him to the music of Messiaen. Messiaen's influence is already apparent in Takemitsu's first performed work, Lento in due movimenti (1950) for piano, which was given at the seventh concert of the New Group of Composers, headed by Kiyose. The work already embodied what would became characteristic elements of Takemitsu's musical language – modal melodies emerging from a chromatic background, the suspension of regular metre and an acute sensitivity to register and timbre. The première was received rather coldly, but there were two enthusiastic supporters in the audience, Yuasa and Akiyama, who were to remain his friends. In 1951, together with other musicians and artists, the three founded a new group, the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), for collaboration on mixed media projects. For this association Takemitsu composed Saegirarenai kyūsoku I (‘Uninterrupted Rest I’, 1952) for piano, written in irregular rhythm without barlines, and the Chamber Concerto (1955) for 13 wind instruments. He then turned to electronic music in Relief statique (1955) and Vocalism A·I (1956); the latter uses only the phonemes ‘a’ and ‘i’ (‘ai’ being the Japanese for ‘love’) pronounced in various ways by two actors. Material is similarly restricted in Mizu no kyoku (‘Water Music’, 1960), formed exclusively from recorded water sounds. Many of Takemitsu's works from the early 1960s are characterized by textural fragmentation. In works such as Ring (1961) and Sacrifice (1962) non-sustaining instruments – such as terz guitar, lute and vibraphone – predominate, and the texture is pointillistic, featuring pizzicato, harmonics and wide intervals.