Takemitsu and shakuhachi
Apr. 29th, 2007 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
I don't know much about Toru Takemitsu, but when I was about 20 I bought a vinyl LP of his music in a secondhand shop in Edinburgh. I found some of his orchestration disappointingly Western (Debussy is the main influence, though some Webern creeps through, especially in the guitar arrangements), but loved the pieces where he updates the spooky ancient Japanese traditional sound of gagaku.It turns out that David Sylvian stumbled across Takemitsu in much the same way, buying a secondhand record by the diminutive composer in the late 70s. He took things much further than me, though, actually befriending Takemitsu and incorporating the man's style (via a sample on "Backwaters" and some influence on the guitar style and string arrangements) in his own records.
Sylvian has a lot to say in the excellent BBC Radio 3 documentary about Takemitsu that went out last Sunday, and due to the BBC's policy of only archiving for seven days, will disappear from their site later today. So I've decided to host it a bit longer here: Enter the Garden: Toru Takemitsu (Stereo mp3 file, 45 mins, 40.6MB). (There's a little 30 second silence half way through; think of it as an intermission.)
There's quite a lot of Takemitsu-related stuff on YouTube. Here's a French documentary showing Takemitsu at work on the soundtrack of Oshima's 1978 film "The Empire of Passion":
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And here's a short Japanese TV appearance where he's standing in the middle of a field, talking about hearing French chanson:
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Takemitsu liked Western pop music, making his own sensual, subtle arrangements of songs like "Yesterday". "He liked David Sylvian, of course!" adds his daughter. Here's Judicael Perroy playing a Takemitsu guitar piece called "Equinox". You can almost imagine it as a piece on "Blemish":
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From Takemitsu to shakuhachi (which is both the Japanese flute and a Japanese slang term for fellatio). If you're in Berlin this evening, come check out a daring performance of a piece called "56 Minutes" by David Woodard. It's at 8pm at COMA, Leipziger Strasse 36 in Mitte. The score is here. Basically, David has cast four friends as Beethoven, Spengler, Nietzsche and Hitler. Playing violin, piano, cello and electronic tones, these actors are fellated to climax by a fifth, a woman in stilettos, while they improvise in ways "dissettlingly pensive, frenzied, ruminative" and then "resolvingly pensive".
I was originally asked to be one of these actors (I'm not sure which of the German anti-heroes David had in mind for me), but Hisae didn't feel too comfortable with the idea of someone playing my shakuhachi. I believe David has since modified the project: this is the "Angelic version" of the piece, which I think means that the fellatio happens in a black and white film projected above the performers' heads. Anyway, this evening's performance will probably confirm that Debussy-esque string arrangements aren't the only way to bring sensuality into your music.
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Gardens with Music
Date: 2007-04-29 12:05 pm (UTC)Miles
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 12:51 pm (UTC)Hee! Dear Sylvia, so magnetic.
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Date: 2007-04-29 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 01:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:51 pm (UTC)On top of this template Woodard imposes his own more adverbial mood instructions: pensive, frenzied, ruminative and, for the fourth movement, pensive again.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 03:17 pm (UTC)Makes one wonder what form non-narrative sex might assume--"glitch sex"?--or is sex doomed to western build-and-release modes?
To the research bed!
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Date: 2007-04-29 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 03:09 pm (UTC)Jim O'Rourke, whose films have been played the Whitney Binneal, played with Sonic Youth from 1999 to 2005, and who has always been attracted to Japan, just released his Tokyo Realization of Takemitsu's Corona (out now on Columbia Japan). No doubt O'Rourke, like you and Sylvian, was introduced to Takemitsu by finding his records in a secondhand shop in the 1970s.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 03:20 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
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Date: 2007-04-29 03:31 pm (UTC)I just did a search on that book you have as an image. It costs over $100!? So much for being available - looks like I'm heading down to the used record shops!
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Date: 2007-04-29 03:40 pm (UTC)He hasn't given up on music completely (obviously, performing Takemitsu), but he hasn't produced anything that's solely his own. Reminds me of Duchamp giving up art for chess, and your friend Anne Laplantine, giving up music for go.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 11:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-30 12:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-02 08:56 am (UTC)There's a great restored, mostly subtitled and region free boxed set of Teshigahara's films out in Japan a couple years ago, but it's priced expensive like typical Japanese releases and only sold as a set. Be aware that under quirky U.S. copyright standards real crap public domain prints of "Woman in the Dunes" were all over the place, especially in the VHS and 16mm "lets rent a foreign art film" era, Seeing and hearing it like half lit mud is difficult to put up with.
Some other random comments- I think there's really only subtle or coincidental influences of Japanese music in Debussy. Maybe a sense of rubato, often little emphasis on a strong steady meter. The asian music more obviously influencing Debussy was the gamelan playing at the 1900 Exposition. On the other hand, Japanese art did play a direct role in inspiring a number of Debussy's compositions.
"Autoportrait" is a Miharu Koshi best of collection with some new tracks. I never picked it up since I have her albums so I'm just guessing. I would guess the Takemitsu material is probably unused or repurposed session material that MK arranged for the Seri album rather than a cover per se.
-ndkent
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Date: 2007-04-29 04:27 pm (UTC)der.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 04:30 pm (UTC)Well, I'm not as supple as I used to be...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 08:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 04:44 pm (UTC)Best way I can describe it is like someone's having an nightmare in an ancient Japanese court... a really bad nightmare...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 05:05 pm (UTC)He does seem to have picked up almost exactly where Debussy's career was cut short due to cancer, a different form of which did him in too. I'd add that Messaien was far more of influence than Webern.
Some of his music was clearly about building bridges between the Western European clasical tradition and facets of traditional Japanese music as well as the avant garde and pre-war classical music. While he may not meet your criteria as a purist, his music was widely heard in many musical worlds and continues to be.
His background was he spent some formative years near a U.S. milatary base which led him to speak solid if whistfully slow English and access to American pop and jazz. He was apparently mostly self taught. He got a major career boost when Igor Stravisnky singled him out when discusing contemporary composers of the 1960s though Seji Ozawa's conducting and friendship enabled his larger works to be performed in a mainstream classical music context.
He mentioned when I heard him lecture that whenever he traveled the world he always would always visit a cinema in a new place to better understand the culture. Clearly a somewhat risky approach if he caught a bad film, but that's apparently what he did.
There is no question in my mind that he was the most artistically succesful classical composer doing film scores. He worked on films for just about all the major Japanese film directors from the mid 60s to the early 90s. Aside from the infamous and brilliant lengthy passages of Kurosawa's "RAN" which reworked Mahler at the insistance of the director, his film scores are frequently more radical and risky than his concert music.
Interesting trivia: Miharu Koshi arranged half of what was to be the last album he worked on, an album survey of his commercial pop songs for the artist Seri.
my souvenir photo
http://technopop.info/tt.jpg
-ndkent
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 08:19 pm (UTC)That's interesting, you know, I thought of Miharu Koshi when I heard Takemitsu talking about the impact of the song "Parlez-Moi D'Amour" on him. Because she covers that on her album Autoportrait (http://www.tagtuner.com/music/albums/KOSHI-Miharu/AUTOPORTRAIT/album-v2bf372).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 09:39 pm (UTC)Like yourself I became aware of the composer through the purchase of an old late seventies Ozawa/Boston S.O. LP of Quatrain and A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden which I still own.
As regards the Debussy comparison, Debussy was extensively influenced by Oriental music and perhaps arguably there may be more fruit of an East/West cross pollination than just direct influence in Takemitsu's music.
I have been listening to - and hugely enjoying - a lot of his piano music lately, often back to back with 'Blemish' and 'The Good Son Versus The Only Daughter' incidentally, of course it's very different music but both have a similar stark, minimalised restraint and do compliment each other.
There is some obvious Western influence in his solo piano music but it's coming more from Webern and Messiaen than Debussy.
In any case Takemitsu was very much his own man and certainly his later compositions for example November Sleeps are particularly Eastern to my ear.
His film music is a mixed bag in my opinion but well worth investigating, the compilation on Nonesuch records would give the curious listener a rewarding overview.
Good post again.
Regards - Thomas Scott.
Takemitsu & Film
Date: 2007-04-29 09:28 pm (UTC)Klaus Volkmer
Filmmuseum Munich
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-30 01:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-30 02:21 pm (UTC)I almost don't believe it, Woodard's thing sounds so similar. I'm concerned for the girl in stilettos, didn't Nietzsche have syphilis?
A showgirl who turned down Hitler's advances before he came to power was asked by an interviewer if she would have pre-emptively dated him, knowing what we now know about the 20th century and Hitler's role therein, and she slapped the shit out of him! There's your answer!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-30 02:40 pm (UTC)Last night turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. There were no historical costumes, no indications that the four musicians were anyone other than themselves, and no hint of fellatio, either live or onscreen.
long story
Date: 2007-04-30 03:56 pm (UTC)The context for this was a similar flame war in December, in which we discovered that this group would blow any concept out of proportion and argue tooth and nail for days, but only if they were arguing against something obviously, undeniably, and incontrovertibly true.
So I picked three statements which honestly addressed these very important public issues, with the goal being that I would receive oral sex from a charming confederate if my three factual statements resulted in at least fifty angry comments by the myopic teenagers online at the school. That was the Baudrillard, the spectacle and non-reality, I wanted their angry delusional slander to get me laid.
Despite informing them of this bounty around comment #26, they continued on, angrily telling me that setting fire to the students was actually a creative act, that the devastating crime spree on campus was not the result of the illiterate security guard who'd just been fired for incompetence, and that when people blow actual rape whistles at the woman who won't stop playing the community piano, it actually means that she's a great piano player and that I am mean for not noticing.
It was perfect, the angrier they got at me, the more they got me laid. The comments got up to 96, nearly double what I needed, and when the school was unexpectedly told that I'd been coercing blowjobs to help cope with being robbed, set on fire, and sonically raped, they were pretty upset.
Many American institutions have this blowjob rule, which states that you need to get in more trouble for oral sex than you would for acts of wanton murder. I got into a great deal of trouble, believe me. And Baudrillard actually died the next day.
Moreso I'm concerned that those readers will think I am not single and available, which I am. Any significant others I might have once had would probably be pleased to know that I'd been insulted online all day long.
Believe it or not, this is the short version of the story.
For fellatio with historical costumes I can only think of a three-second clip from the Australian film Bliss, which shows a sister fellating her brother for drugs while he wears an SS costume. It is quite sinister, and thankfully very brief. Great movie though.
Re: long story
Date: 2007-04-30 04:17 pm (UTC)By blurring the distinctions between thermodynamic properties and narrative devices, I have found how to turn the absence of kindness, which should be a narrative event, into measurably large amounts of electricity, proving that all matter is alive, and thus Shinto correct.
To this end I really liked the Socratic dialog you posted earlier.
Re: We are all responsible for our own reality
Date: 2007-05-16 06:22 am (UTC)WHAT THE FUCK
Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK
Can't you ref Heidegger's "you all ways pull the pigTALE of the girl you are sweetest on at recess" theorim or are you prone to being distracted by the fact he was the Nazi forbearer of Andrea Dworkin?
GAcked from AIM?
ref.: me: whats that fat Nazi feminist who just croaked? Andrea Dworkin?
k fat was mean but GERMANe
the personal is political yo
YOU ROCK, DaVE
CAN'T YOU SHUT UP LONG ENOUGH TO hEAR us say that?
kinda transPARENT isnt it flattering yourself? ref.: Mommy is that yEW?
Date: 2007-05-16 05:49 pm (UTC)you threw out your back patting yourself there like that?
the machine i had set my shit out in for lurking is not where you are now
Re: a hint of fellatio is on your tongue?
Date: 2007-05-17 05:37 am (UTC)Re: We are all responsible for our own SINS . . . they cant just be DELETED
Date: 2007-10-10 03:20 am (UTC)ref: MAX FROST . . . eYe am COMING for you