Magellan's Log: Flows: Toru Takemitsu

pentagonalgardenpierredelvincourt.jpg (27064 bytes)
Toru Takemitsu and the Pentagonal Garden.
Etching by Pierre Delvincourt.

Klassical Karaoke
by Angus Verspeeten

A sound is undoubtedly a living thing. It is like nature that has no individuality. As transformation of the wind or water is complicated, a sound becomes rich or even poor. That depends on how deeply our sensitivities accept sound. We composers should not assume arrogant attitudes toward sound, because we write music in collaboration with sounds.
--Toru Takemitsu.

1. The Parable of the Cartwright

By the end of the 19th century, after millennia of practice, wagonmakers had elevated their homely craft almost to the level of art, creating carriages that rode smoothly and quietly and were often beautiful to behold. Messrs. Daimler, Benz, Ford, et al. had different ideas about locomotion, of course, and by the dawn of the 20th century nobody was interested in the fine art of carriage design. Now those wondrous, ungainly objects, the result of millennia of development, are nothing more than lovely museum pieces.

Consider, if you will, by way of comparison, the symphony orchestra, itself a self-acknowledged crown of musical creation. The result of centuries of torturous, difficult development, the symphony orchestra by the end of the 19th century had achieved a final, finely honed, burnished condition. An extraordinarily complex and large instrument, involving the voluntary participation of a hundred highly trained humans willing to submit to the coordinating control of one super-human called the "conductor" for the sole purpose of creating long periods of carefully crafted organized sound called "music."

As the 20th century dawned, the symphony orchestra, in its unlikely perfection, was truly one of the more remarkable human inventions. As affluence spread during that troubled century, every municipality with any civic pride and wherewithal felt the need to support a symphony orchestra bearing the city's name.

Three things happened as a result of this rush to musical urbanity:

1. Hundreds, indeed, thousands of orchestras sprang up around the world (which of course did wonders for music school enrollment).

2. These thousands of ensembles had seasons, many nights of concertizing, which they had to fill with two or three hours of their glorious, textured. organized sound called "music." Fortunately, Europe in the two previous centuries had been busy creating scores for precisely such ensembles. So there was plenty of organized sound at hand.

3. But musicians, by their nature, long for new stuff to learn. Even audiences can hear the "Ode to Joy" only so many times before boredom sets in. Thus, as the century wore on, the need for NEW symphonic music was a continuing pressure on, and temptation for, composers. Who duly responded.

By century's end, it seemed that the rich aural potential of the symphony orchestra had been pretty well explored and exploited. New sounds from the instrument of 100 voices were hard to come by. A kind of forcedly creative regurgitation was the order of the day, as audiences were forced to listen to neo-this and neo-that from the latest Wunderkind bent on breathing new life into old forms.

2. Genius Will Out.

Occasionally, as the symphonic ensemble spread around the planet, crossing cultural and political boundaries, it would pick up a new spark of life. An ancient, local bit of musical heritage, breathed upon by an indigenous young composer versed in the mysteries of symphonic writing would leap from some provincial outback into a spiffy new concert hall. Musical seeds, many of them turning out to be weeds, sprouted all over the world. But orchids will be orchids.

In Japan Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) took the symphony orchestra and in a lifetime of mindful struggling made of it what he needed.

From the long list of his compositions (some of which, if you've attended to Japanese movies, you've heard), one example here, one important, highly rewarding example: a concerto for percussion quintet and orchestra, "From Me Flows What You Call Time."

In the first half of this 35-minute wonder, Takemitsu wanders knowingly through a late-modern musical thicket, conjuring a jungle as imagined by perhaps a dodecaphonic Debussy. Lovely, intriguing even, but we've heard it all before, too many times. And surely Takemitsu knew this. He's looking for a way out. And halfway through, he finds it. Suddenly he emerges-- and takes us with him, into a kind of Zen-like clearing, an open space where abruptly he enables us to hear the music of silence and the silence of music.

In the last half of the concerto, he gives the five percussionists their head, and while the 100 voices of the orchestra wait politely, attentively, patiently behind them, off they go into a world, a universe of beat, hit sound so skillfully contrived that it seems perfectly random resting as it does on the solid foundation of silence-which-is-no-silence.

He wrote the piece for Nexus, a group of Toronto percussionists, who have recorded it with the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. Their realization of "From me Flows What You Call Time" is a reminder yet again that the old century, for all its excesses, served up many marvels for the litany of chronism.

END