Exception to Tōru Takemitsu's Oeuvre: Theater Piece Blue Aurora (original) (raw)
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Exception to Toru Takemitsuʼs Oeuvre : theater piece Blue Aurora
International Review of The Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 2021
Influenced by John Cage’s innovations, the use of graphic score and indeterminacy in instrumental pieces, Tōru Takemitsu also took approach to happenings or theater pieces. This article gives insight into the earliest among his theater pieces – Blue Aurora for Toshi Ichiyanagi (1964), premiered by John Cage. Its score is based on Takemitsu’s three pages long abstract graphic score, with a drawing by a composer himself, and notes for performances, both of which have to be taken into account when performing the piece. By analysing the making process of the score itself as well as its key words E’en, See-SEE… senSe… esSeNSe…, and its different variations of its performance, the article reveals Takemitsu’s approach to theater pieces.
2020
Part one of this study presents and compares two original analyses of orchestral works by the Japanese composer, Tōru Takemitsu (1930–96), with the aim of identifying common compositional techniques rather than stylistic characteristics. Spirit Garden (1994) and Dreamtime (1981) are examined in terms of form, pitch manipulation, thematic and motivic variation and transformation, as well as extramusical influences. It is suggested that some of the compositional processes employed in both pieces are similar but seem to have been developed and refined over the intervening thirteen-year period. It is also suggested that a number of the identified processes are conceptually related, reflecting Takemitsu’s interest in word games such as crosswords and anagrams etc. The brevity of this study does not allow for an exhaustive study of the composer’s technical toolkit, representing as it does only two isolated moments in Takemitsu’s substantial output, but various avenues for further research...
MORE THAN A SATISFYING CONTINUITY, 2020
Part one of this study presents and compares two original analyses of orchestral works by the Japanese composer, Tōru Takemitsu (1930–96), with the aim of identifying common compositional techniques rather than stylistic characteristics. Spirit Garden (1994) and Dreamtime (1981) are examined in terms of form, pitch manipulation, thematic and motivic variation and transformation, as well as extramusical influences. It is suggested that some of the compositional processes employed in both pieces are similar but seem to have been developed and refined over the intervening thirteen-year period. It is also suggested that a number of the identified processes are conceptually related, reflecting Takemitsu’s interest in word games such as crosswords and anagrams etc. The brevity of this study does not allow for an exhaustive study of the composer’s technical toolkit, representing as it does only two isolated moments in Takemitsu’s substantial output, but various avenues for further research are indicated in the concluding chapter. Part two consists of a brief commentary and analysis of the work submitted in the accompanying composition portfolio.
Expressive Meaning and Historical Grounding in the Film Music of Fumio Hayasaka and Toru Takemitsu
Journal of Film Music, 2010
known for his score to Akira Kurosawa᾽s film Rashōmon, is little known outside Japan. In this essay, I discuss the following issues: 1) how Takiguchi᾽s experimental ideas might have manifested themselves in Takemitsu᾽s early compositions; and 2) how Hayasaka᾽s mentorship, friendship, and ideals of the nature of Japanese concert music might have influenced Takemitsu᾽s early pieces. I analyze some earlier compositions by Takemitsu to discuss the influences on his music by his two mentors, whose attitudes seemingly had come from opposite spectrums.
2020
Among the myriad of writings on Takemitsu, the theme of the Japanese garden, conceptualized here as the “Musical Garden”, is not infrequent, but is seldom examined as an aesthetic end in Takemitsu’s works. This essay’s goal will be to provide and conclude on a comprehensive synthesis of previous analysis on the subject, in order to understand the concept of the Musical Garden and how it sheds light on Takemitsu’s music, especially in regards to the listener’s experience. Unlike other publications on Takemitsu which deal with advanced analysis of musical notation, this essay will be focusing mainly on the aesthetic principles which frame both his music and the Japanese garden and give meaning to our encounters and exposure to these artforms. In this study, and in a concern of aesthetic heritage, cultural Japanese specificities will be written in kanji characters. Ultimately, this subject is abstract and metaphorical, and one must not expect a rigorously scientific or demonstrative approach, but rather a free, hypothetical yet strongly supported one.
Symbolism in Takemitsu’s Film Score for Kurosawa’s Dodes’ ka-den
Tōru Takemitsu synthesized Eastern and Western aesthetics to create a universal art music that had no polar boundaries. The Japanese-born artist was not only an art music composer, but was a writer on aesthetics, an author of detective novels, and a prolific film composer. As a modernist and symbolist composer, Takemitsu’s music often evokes an unrelenting impression of nature to the listener’s subconscious by using various forms of musical metaphors. Although Takemitsu was not regarded as synaesthetic (associating sounds with colors), his approach on nature differed slightly compared to mentors, Debussy and Messiaen. While Debussy’s aesthetics of nature is described as an unconventional musical prose and not a disquieting perception of nature, Takemitsu’s is of a “temporal time and space,” which shares great similarities with Messiaen’s mystical approach. Takemitsu’s spatial aesthetics are evident in both his art and film music, coinciding with his aesthetics of “silence and death.” In Takemitsu’s film score for Kurosawa’s Dodes’ ka-den, the cues for the Beggar and son reveal Takemitsu’s use of “ironic symbolism” (the use of ironic musical materials to depict the inconsistencies of a drama). His musical symbolisms are evident in (1) the use of silence, noise, and other sonic elements, (2) the use of neo-tonality, and (3) the use of colorful and dissonant orchestration. These musical symbolisms inevitably illuminate Takemitsu’s metaphor of a universal aesthetics, “swimming in an ocean that has no East or West.”
The music of Tōru Takemitsu is often stated to be essentially Japanese. However, previous studies on Takemitsu tend to highlight the composer’s reception of Japanese aesthetics and philosophy rather than his preoccupation with Japan’s various musical traditions. This study traces the influence of these traditions in a particular segment of Takemitsu’s oeuvre, namely, the piano works. Analyses of selected pieces from this repertoire will show how tradition and innovation (the provenance of which is not always apparent) have merged into Takemitsu’s highly distinctive musical language.
Abstraction, Theatre and the Musical Frame
"Brief Synopsis: a beautiful naked woman ‘of a certain age’ brutally stabs a young man to death" is a practice-led research project that consists of a production staged at Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney (November 27th – 29th, 2013) and an exegesis exploring how physical notions of space and the abstract qualities more generally attributed to music (tempi, dynamics, durations) can provide the structural, narrative and aesthetic building blocks of a new theatre work. The project considers how existing structures (vocal expressivity, linear narrative, etc.) limit the understanding and practice of theatre and impact the creation of new work. In asking if a work such as "Brief Synopsis" could be described as operatic, it reframes that question in terms of what might be described as a composer’s theatre. The exegesis interrogates the process of creating "Brief Synopsis", contemplating precedence in theatre practice history with reference to my own work over past decades, in its elaboration of the methodology intrinsic to my making of a work. It argues a case for alternative strategies (extant and possible) to nineteenth-century models in the creation of a theatre that might be described as both “postdramatic” and “post-operatic”, guided by recent theoretical engagements with contemporary theatre and the concept of ‘musicalization’ (Roesner 2008, Lehmann 2006, Till 2006). "Brief Synopsis" aims to contribute to research that documents the creative process and in doing so, theories of performance that conceptualise approaches to the theatre medium as an abstract “landscape” in which the body, text, sound, space and character coexist within a visual/spatial construct, blurring the separation between scenario and image, story and style, content and form.
Leo Brouwer's Hika: In Memoriam Toru Takemitsu: an Analysis of Musical Contour and Form
2020
Apart from studying the local musical organization based on the theme, its developments, transformations, variations, rhythm, and dynamics, my analysis will look into a deeper and a more coherent structure constructed by the above elements via their contour representations. Through this analysis, I will propose a stronger and more intimate relationship between the references to Takemitsu's music as well as to Brouwer's and the narrative of the formal architecture in Hika.