Toru Takemitsu

Introduction

Japanese masters of traditional instruments use a simple phrase to explain the essence of Japanese music. “Ongaku-nai.” It means “no melody”. To the Japanese ear, this is a given when enjoying the most traditional of Japanese music. To the western ear, that same highly respected music can sound noisy and irritating. This difference is central to the experience of most Japanese art forms, including its cinema and film music.

Listening to the atonality of 20th Century music can be more like hard work than sensual pleasure for many listeners. Yet to a Japanese ear, the issue of what is tonal and what is atonal is not as clearly designated as it is in western culture. In Japan, Brahms and Bartok are viewed as part of the same harmonic tradition. Furthermore, the most traditional of Japanese music can appear to us in the west as far more demanding and uninviting than anything by Bartok. So listening to Japanese composers who merge these historical and cultural traditions can be fascinating and complex.

But this should not be construed as a difficult task. Most of Japan is a difficult map to read. Maybe it’s better to simply get lost and savour the scenery. Japanese cinema is certainly a unique cultural art form, so it is not surprising that Japanese film music operates differently from western models. Fortunately, there is a key Japanese composer who embodies all of this in just about anything he has done: Toru Takemitsu.

Kwaidan (1964)

Takemitsu's radical score for Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film KAIDAN. In this horror anthology, everything is ill-timed and no sound directly mimics onscreen action. Thoroughly devoid of Western sensibilities, it displays a ruthless asynchronism and a flagrant disavowal of musical signification. In the anthology’s first story, a man returns home having left his wife years ago. Unbeknown to him, she has passed away. He sleeps with her ghost, then wakes to find the house in a state of total decay. He charges through the house, crashing through the torn paper walls and rotting wood frames, and gradually withers to a skeletal corpse. The score’s raspy breathiness devolves into a landscape primarily comprised of, well, 'improvised wood creaks'. As his body dries up to a skeleton, so does the score texturally contract to a fractal network of wood splinters, bone fractures and gravel sprinklings. In a bizarrely concocted imagining of Japanese 16th Century futurism, the 'music' sounds like an instrument being destroyed before our very ears. The effect is haunting, memorable and exact.

While the minimalist shakuhachi flute tones evoke an identifiable 'Easterness' to many westerners, the shakuhachi that recurs throughout KAIDAN sonically falls between the cracks of sound, music and noise. Firstly, the shakuhachi is one of a number of Japanese instruments that intentionally embraces noise: part of its performance mode is to bring an excess of breath pressure on the reed to traumatize its otherwise pure tone. Secondly, the reverberant recording of Takemitsu's score intensifies the noise effect by inducing what at times sounds remarkably like ring modulation distortion. At any one moment, the shakuhachi shifts wildly from a conservative lilt to an alien spasm; from an ancient wooden instrument to a post-industrial electronic weapon. In KAIDAN, this poetically synchs to a highly modernist film reworking traditional folk tales.

Silence (1971)

No, you’re not hearing two tracks played at once. This is the score to Masahiro Shinoda’s 1971 film SILENCE. If the music sounds dissonant, it has been deliberately composed that way by Takemitsu. The film’s story is set in Japan in the 1500s when Portuguese Christian missionaries were being persecuted by the Japanese. The terse score reflects the acerbic taste that imported Christian dogma left with the Japanese at the time. In high modernist mode, Takemitsu literally tortures and abuses the European lute melody, subjecting it to a series of contra-melodic overlays. The violence that emanates from this unforgiving meld of contrasted cultural harmonies separates all Western tuning systems from non-Western modalities. While many presume Eastern harmony to revolve around the 5-note pentatonic scale, this in itself is a Western perception. The performance, resonance and sonic aura of any Japanese musical figure lives beyond written notation as a physical sensation. Hence, microtonal and timbrel facets of music come much more to the fore than they do within the European art music tradition.

In the score to SILENCE, Takemitsu employs prepared instrument technique – placing vibrating objects in between the strings of instruments so as to render their sound percussive and accentuate their harmonic overlays in place of their pure notes. Ironically, the invention of the prepared piano comes from John Cage who in the late 30s was influenced by the rich harmonic shimmering characteristic of a range of Asian and Pacific music. Well-versed in the history of modern music’s relation to Eastern traditions, Takemitsu presents the dissonance resulting from differences in tuning systems to symbolize the vast harmonic gaps between one musical culture and another. Scoring from a Japanese perspective, he creates for us the sensation of being Asian and hearing ancient European music for the first time. It certainly sounds unfamiliar.

The Ceremony (1971)

Nagisa Oshima’s 1971 film, THE CEREMONY is one of numerous films made in Japan about ritual suicide. The film is a study of how such mortal finality finds a place within the changing face of modern Japan. Toru Takemitsu’s use of the serialist vocabulary here is crucial to contextualising the modernist guise of Japan – at the time still emerging from the post-war era. In a style reminiscent of Anton Webern, Takemitsu draws harmonic lines that hang unresolved and form strange chromatic structures with other lines. The music created resembles a fungal webbing more than any classical architectural form. It moves and breathes in formidably unhuman ways. This is possibly the core difficulty that many people find with the atonal tradition: its abstract essence devoid of human presence. But for Takemitsu, the absence of the human is the means of finding beauty in nature.

The key instrument heard throughout THE CEREMONY is a solo violin. In Takemitsu’s atonal landscape, the solo violin symbolizes the floating human emptiness of he who considers ritual suicide: estranged by society through individual action, yet condemned to individually erase oneself for society. The violin works through a series of self-analytical contortions. Its melodic status is always in quandary, just as the plight of potential suicide can cause one’s mind to detach all thoughts into a swirl of frightening projections. True to the expanded philosophical schema which typifies much Japanese thought, Takemitsu’s violin and orchestration sift through all the variations, gestures and timbres possible.

In The Realm Of The Senses (1978)

There’s a common presumption that atonal composers of the 20th Century were a dour, analytical, dogmatic bunch of musical intellectuals. Compared to the lurid affectations of the Romantics, they possibly were. But really, the atonal composers wished to strip the harmonious of its costumery and caress the bare flesh of its sound. Orchestral sonority was a prime pursuit, and composers had to listen beyond music to achieve their results. Working well within this tradition, Takemitsu summed up his approach succinctly: “I compose with sound” he once said.

Tactility becomes aural eroticism in Takemitsu’s score to Nagisa Oshima’s 1978 film IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES. Controversial in its depiction of a consuming love affair that leads to a geisha castrating her lover as per his wishes, the film was banned in many countries for many years. Takemitsu folds tonality into atonality similar to the way sadism and masochism attract and bond. This is no mere mood music for a passionate love affair: it is a score that reflects the ways that passions eat into each other, and the ways that lovers can consume each other. Only an ear for the expanded tonal possibilities that arise when one truly emancipates dissonance could score such a love story.

Ran (1985)

If war, as they say, is madness, then one of cinema’s most powerful war movies is Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film RAN. Based on Shakespeare’s KING LEAR, it imports the famous classical drama to 16th Century Japan, and paints a portrait of military madness and those it afflicts. RAN translates as ‘chaos’, and the film coldly studies the man-made madness that proceeds battle plans. In place of offering a deafening din to symbolise this, Toru Takemitsu delivers one of his most romantic scores. His lush sighing strings evoke the brutal beauty signposted by Igor Stravinsky’s RITE OF SPRING. And just as Stravinsky’s ballet was based upon Russian pagan rituals and songs, Takemitsu deftly threads traditional Japanese themes into the epic tapestry of RAN.

Taking his cues from a range of visual dynamics, Takemitsu conducts his symphonic machine like a lord directing battle. Volcanic expanses, mountainous mist, fluttering flags and flanks of soldiers are all musically symbolised. The score to RAN is in fact pastoral: it renders the terrain of war as a musical backdrop for the psychological deteriorization that befalls its war lords. The discernibly melodic elements are musical gestures that capture these mental schisms true to KING LEAR’s narrative. Through Takemitsu’s fusion of the psychological with the pastoral, the link between one madman and the chaos that results from his directives is expressed with grandeur and pathos.

Two distinct figures recur throughout RAN: a surging full orchestra refrain, and a wailing solo flute. These represent respectively the mass and the individual. Pending their placement in the film, they also depict the soldiers and the lords, or the controlling energy of the unleashed war machine and the frail voice that opposes its momentum. The interplay between the flute and the orchestra portrays a tragic loss and gradual disempowerment, for just as the army eradicates the individual solider, so does the war lord destroy his own troops.

This fatalistic loop is central to RAN’s vainglorious story. Rhythm is employed to mark the tempo for the forces as they head onward to a futile conflict. Yet this same pulse colours the main orchestral refrain as a funeral march. The momentum of the soldiers suggests they are doomed from the outset. Like a catastrophe slowly playing itself out to an inevitable conclusion, Takemitsu draws out his themes with not an ounce of bravado, but an ocean of regret. The end result is a palpable energy that celebrates both musicians and their instruments while creating music that will exist only as a recording on the soundtrack.

Outro

Toru Takemitsu. Not simply a composer of Japanese films, but a musical philosopher skilled in articulating the great East/West divide in his internationalist scores. Promoter of the sonic in the face of musical dogma; painter of the musical in a world surrounded by noise. Creator of violent beauty and gorgeous alienation, he stands as the most radical film composer of the 20th Century – mostly because he audibly acknowledged the era in which he lived.