40 Facts About Toru Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory.

Largely self-taught, Toru Takemitsu was admired for the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre.

Toru Takemitsu is known for combining elements of oriental and occidental philosophy and for fusing sound with silence and tradition with innovation.

Toru Takemitsu composed several hundred independent works of music, scored more than ninety films and published twenty books.

Toru Takemitsu was a founding member of the Jikken Kobo in Japan, a group of avant-garde artists who distanced themselves from academia and whose collaborative work is often regarded among the most influential of the 20th century.

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Toru Takemitsu was the recipient of numerous awards and honours and the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award is named after him.

Toru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on 8 October 1930; a month later his family moved to Dalian in the Chinese province of Liaoning.

Toru Takemitsu first became conscious of Western classical music during his term of military service, in the form of a popular French Song which he listened to with colleagues in secret, played on a gramophone with a makeshift needle fashioned from bamboo.

Toru Takemitsu explained much later, in a lecture at the New York International Festival of the Arts, that for him Japanese traditional music "always recalled the bitter memories of war".

In 1951, Toru Takemitsu was a founding member of the anti-academic Jikken Kobo: an artistic group established for multidisciplinary collaboration on mixed-media projects, who sought to avoid Japanese artistic tradition.

Toru Takemitsu studied in the early 1950s with the composer Fumio Hayasaka, perhaps best known for the scores he wrote for films by Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, the latter of whom Toru Takemitsu would collaborate with decades later.

Stravinsky subsequently invited Toru Takemitsu to lunch; and for Toru Takemitsu this was an "unforgettable" experience.

In 1967, Toru Takemitsu received a commission from the New York Philharmonic, to commemorate the orchestra's 125th anniversary, for which he wrote November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra.

In 1972, Toru Takemitsu, accompanied by Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, and others, heard Balinese gamelan music in Bali.

For Toru Takemitsu by now quite familiar with his own native musical tradition, there was a relationship between "the sounds of the gamelan, the tone of the kapachi, the unique scales and rhythms by which they are formed, and Japanese traditional music which had shaped such a large part of my sensitivity".

Year later, Toru Takemitsu returned to the instrumental combination of shakuhachi, biwa, and orchestra, in the less well known work Autumn .

Also, during a contemporary music festival in April 1970, produced by the Japanese composer himself, Toru Takemitsu met among the participants Lukas Foss, Peter Sculthorpe, and Vinko Globokar.

Later that year, as part of a commission from Paul Sacher and the Zurich Collegium Musicum, Toru Takemitsu incorporated into his Eucalypts I parts for international performers: flautist Aurele Nicolet, oboist Heinz Holliger, and harpist Ursula Holliger.

Toru Takemitsu was there at the invitation of the choreographer Jiri Kylian.

Toward the end of his life, Toru Takemitsu had planned to complete an opera, a collaboration with the novelist Barry Gifford and the director Daniel Schmid, commissioned by the Opera National de Lyon in France.

Toru Takemitsu was in the process of publishing a plan of its musical and dramatic structure with Kenzaburo Oe, but he was prevented from completing it by his death at 65.

Toru Takemitsu died of pneumonia on 20 February 1996, while undergoing treatment for bladder cancer.

Toru Takemitsu's first met Toru in 1951, cared for him when he was suffering from tuberculosis in his early twenties, then married him in 1954.

Composers whom Toru Takemitsu cited as influential in his early work include Claude Debussy, Anton Webern, Edgard Varese, Arnold Schoenberg, and Olivier Messiaen.

Nevertheless, Toru Takemitsu incorporated some idiomatic elements of Japanese music in his very earliest works, perhaps unconsciously.

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When Toru Takemitsu discovered that these "nationalist" elements had somehow found their way into his music, he was so alarmed that he later destroyed the works.

In 1970, Toru Takemitsu received a commission from the National Theatre of Japan to write a work for the gagaku ensemble of the Imperial Household; this was fulfilled in 1973, when he completed Shuteiga .

Influence of Olivier Messiaen on Toru Takemitsu was already apparent in some of Toru Takemitsu's earliest published works.

However, Toru Takemitsu pointed out that he had used the octatonic collection in his music before ever coming across it in Messiaen's music.

Toru Takemitsu responded to this with his homage to the French composer, Quatrain, for which he asked Messiaen's permission to use the same instrumental combination for the main quartet, cello, violin, clarinet and piano .

In 1977, Toru Takemitsu reworked Quatrain for quartet alone, without orchestra, and titled the new work Quatrain II.

Toru Takemitsu frequently expressed his indebtedness to Claude Debussy, referring to the French composer as his "great mentor".

One aspect of John Cage's compositional procedure that Toru Takemitsu continued to use throughout his career, was the use of indeterminacy, in which performers are given a degree of choice in what to perform.

Toru Takemitsu was the first Japanese composer fully recognized in the west, and remained the guiding light for the younger generations of Japanese composers.

Toru Takemitsu is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition.

Toru Takemitsu won awards for composition, both in Japan and abroad, including the Prix Italia for his orchestral work Tableau noir in 1958, the Otaka Prize in 1976 and 1981, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award in 1987 and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1994 .

Toru Takemitsu was invited to attend numerous international festivals throughout his career, and presented lectures and talks at academic institutions across the world.

Toru Takemitsu was made an honorary member of the Akademie der Kunste of the DDR in 1979, and the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1985.

Toru Takemitsu was admitted to the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985, and the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1986.

Posthumously, Toru Takemitsu received an Honorary Doctorate from Columbia University early in 1996 and was awarded the fourth Glenn Gould Prize in fall 1996.