Toru
Takemitsu
Programme
4 - radio script final draft
Score
[A]
A KAIDAN – Parts F + G 0.30
Commentary [B] With Score A playing underneath
after 30” full-volume
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.
Score [C]
C 1. KAIDAN – Part B 3.13
C 2. KAIDAN – Part C 2.30
Commentary [D] With Score C.2 positioned underneath
after 1’ full-volume
Takemitsu's radical score for Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film
KAIDAN. 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.
Score [E]
E KAIDAN – Part D 1.00
Commentary [F] With Score E playing underneath
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.
Score [G/H]
G KAIDAN – Part E 2.56
H 1. SILENCE – Part A 1.52
H 2. SILENCE – Part C 1.52
Commentary [I] With Score H.2 positioned underneath
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 serious 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.
Score [H/J]
H 1. SILENCE – Part B 3.03
H 2. SILENCE – Part D 1.36
J 1. THE CEREMONY – Part A 2.08
J 2. THE CEREMONY – Part B + C 2.53
Commentary [K] With Score J.2 positioned underneath
after 40” full-volume
You’re listening to TRACES OF SOUNDTRACKS on ABC Classic
FM. And today, the music of film composer Toru Takemitsu.
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.
Score [L/M]
L THE CEREMONY – Part D + E + F 3.08
M IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES – Part C 2.52
Commentary [N] With Score Mplaying underneath then
fade out
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.
Score [O/P]
O IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES – Part D + F + H 9.30
P 1. RAN – Part J 4.48
P 2. RAN – Part M 2.03
Commentary [Q] With Score P.2 playing underneath
You’re listening to TRACES OF SOUNDTRACKS with Philip
Brophy. Today, the film music of Toru Takemitsu. 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.
Score [R]
R 1. RAN – Part K + L 5.39
R 2. RAN – Part E 1.27
Commentary
[S] With Score R.2 playing underneath
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.
Score
[T]
T 1. RAN – Part A + N 4.44
T 2. RAN – Part O 0.48
Commentary [U] With Score T.2 playing underneath
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.
