Toru Takemitsu, "Asterism"

Notes From RCA LSC-3099:

Toru Takemitsu, the leading figure among Japan's proliferating contemporary composers, is a short, reed-slender man of middle years whose name, translated, combines Fire and Water. To the world he presents the face of a Zen-Buddhist monk who has learned the supreme disciplines of mind and body. The features are an ageless mask, with hooded eyes (spaced widely beneath a high forehead) that seem to see at the same time All Things and Nothing. When he does speak, in a multilingual, soft voice that belies little formal education, Takemitsu is polite, laconic, articulate, apparently guarded if not entirely withdrawn. Observed carelessly (in his presence only the crude could be casual), he seems in body and strength to be fragile, preoccupied with inner voices not only calling to him but draining him by their incessant demands for attention. He could be, in western eyes, a prototypal Oriental-except that, evident even to sentient strangers passing him on the street, he projects an inner radiance and resilience.

No ordinary mortal, this Takemitsu. How extraordinary he is- this man who composes not merely for a livelihood but from an atavistic need to release creative energies-can be learned only from personal acquaintance, or from hearing, rehearing and then hearing again and again his expressively contracted, precisely calculated music. Rather quickly evident in spite of concealment, if one is privileged to have him extend the hand of friendship, is much grievous suffering in his life, which began on October 8, 1930-between the morning hours of 4 and 5-in Tokyo. Yet any efforts at interrogation are gently, and in the same breath firmly, parried. His past, before the age of 18 especially, remains a secret forge in which the private creator and the public figure were tempered. His remarkable command of English he acquired in his mid- teens as a busboy at an American officers' mess in postwar Yokohama. His comprehensive command of the entire musical vocabulary, from pre-Christian modes to the latest innovations no matter where in the world, he taught himself almost completely. Official biographies name Yasuji Kiyose as his composition instructor-a senior-generation composer, fondly regarded by his pupil, whose music even in Japan has suffered undeserving neglect.

But Takemitsu in fact studied with Kiyose only two years. It was during a slow recovery from tuberculosis in his 18th year that the young man decided finally to become a composer, the interest stemming from his response to live musical performances heard for the first time only two years earlier. Once exposed he became incurably addicted. Not in the sense, however, of an armchair devotee content to experience, secondhand, the self-expression of others. With the same precision that characterizes his manuscript scores (for performers, an astounding clarification of prodigious complexities), Takemitsu educated himself in greater part. His first acknowledged work, composed as recently as 1950, was Two Lentos for piano. By 1956 he had completed major works for magnetic tape, including Vocalism Ai. A year later he ventured for the first time into the realm of orchestra, producing Requiem for strings, premiered in Tokyo and introduced in North America by Thor Johnson at the University of Wisconsin, with the Fine Arts String Quartet as first-chair players. More recent music, painstakingly composed, has covered the spectrum of performer-possibilities, from solo and chamber works (including Eclipse and November Steps for the biwa and shakuhachi) to film scores for Hara-Kiri, Woman of the Dunes, Kwaidan and, his latest, Face of Another.

Already in 1951, with colleagues of his own age group, he had organized Tokyo's Experimental Workshop-a modest beginning when measured against Orchestral Space, which he, Seiji Ozawa and Toshi Ichiyanagi created in 1966 as a forum for international contemporary music. It is essential for Takemitsu, however, that he compose first and proselytize second, preferably in a mountain retreat northwest of Tokyo, close to nature-which is inseparable from music in his ethic as the substance of daily life. This daily life, as opposed to public life, is characterized by a self-discipline, gentleness and courtesy already legend, coupled with a wit that cuts across all national boundaries. Almost compulsively, he is a semanticist whose creative juices are caused to flow most freely by some pre-determined verbal association. If, in the instance of Asterism, this verbal association seems at a glance arcane, he nevertheless intended all three dictionary meanings of the word- quoted in the full score from the American College Dictionary published by Random House-to appertain:



"Asterism: 1. (Astronomy) a. a group of stars, b. a constellation. 2. (Crystallography) a property of some crystallized minerals showing a starlike luminous figure in transmitted light or, in a cabochon-cut stone, by reflected light. 3. three asterisks placed before a passage to direct attention to it. (from Greek 'asterismos' derived from 'asterizein' = mark with stars.)"

Commissioned in 1968 by RCA Records and "respectfully dedicated to Yuji Takahashi and Seiji Ozawa," Asterism is scored for conventional forces, with an explicit number of strings plus a much expanded percussion section instructed, among other departures, to rub the spine of a hard-rubber comb across a suspended cymbal, to draw a double-bass bow across one of three pitched Chinese gongs and to use two beaters against a tam-tam during the crescendo that is the anguishing, ultimately ecstatic climax of this music. Asterism was given its world premiere by Seiji Ozawa, Yuji Takahashi and the Toronto Symphony on January 14,1969.