PROGRAM NOTES

Three Film Scores

Tōru Takemitsu

First Performance on this Series

Born: October 8, 1930, in Tokyo, Japan

Died: February 20, 1996, in Tokyo

Work composed: The three movements were composed respectively in 1959, 1989, and 1966, and were arranged into this suite in 1994-95

Work premiered: March 9, 1995, at the CineMusic Festival in Gstaad, Switzerland, with William Boughton conducting the English String Orchestra

Instrumentation: String orchestra

Tōru Takemitsu grew up amidst wartime deprivations, first during the Invasion of Manchuria (where his family was living) and Second Sino-Japanese War, then during World War II. He encountered Western popular music and jazz while working at a Tokyo food dept during World War II; and after the war, he enlivened many bed-bound months (as a tuberculosis patient) by listening to music, including classical works, on the U.S. Armed Forces radio network. He grew healthy enough to start congregating with likeminded music aficionados, gaining exposure to diverse masterpieces of modern European music, including Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. He began essaying his own compositions and in 1950 received his first public performance at a concert organized by one of those musical circles. He caught the attention of the composer Fumio Hayasaka, famous for his film scores for Akira Kurosawa’s Rashōmon (1950) and later Shichinin no samurai/The Seven Samurai (1954), and was hired to copy scores for his film projects, an assignment that would fatefully usher Takemitsu himself into the world of film composition.

In 1964, Takemitsu made his first overseas trip as a composer, to an electronic music festival in San Francisco, where he renewed his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor, both of whom he had met previously in Japan. Cage encouraged Takemitsu to investigate Japanese musical traditions, which Takemitsu had previously avoided out of preference for absorbing Western styles. The year 1965 found him in Paris spending time with Messiaen, the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, and the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, all of whom provided important inspiration. In 1967 he was in New York as a guest of the John D. Rockefeller III Foundation; during his stay, the New York Philharmonic’s premiere of his November Steps catapulted him to the A-list. He would become the most widely honored of Japanese composers, receiving memberships in the Akademie der Künste of the DDR, American Institute of Arts and Letters, France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts (plus the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres), and Royal Academy of Music (England), as well as the prestigious Grawemeyer Award.

Takemitsu is admired internationally in the concert hall for his luminous orchestral and chamber works. His film scores are less widely known, Japanese cinema generally qualifying as “connoisseur fare’ outside of that country. In fact, he produced more than a hundred film scores, including for such acclaimed Japanese New Wave directors as Kurosawa (Ran), Masaki Kobayashi, Masahiro Shinoda, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Shōhei Imamura. Takemitsu was a film fanatic. He estimated that he watched 300 movies per year, sometimes approaching them more as visual artworks than as narratives; he said that when traveling he would often seek out films in local languages, the dialogue of which he could not understand. Apart from the aesthetic pleasures it brought him, writing film scores provided enough income to free him from the need to teach at a university, as so many composers must. Film scores, he said, were his “liberty passport,” enabling him to be an independent composer.

In 1994-95 he assembled three excerpts from his film music into the suite titled Three Film Scores, arranged for string orchestra. The first movement, “Music for Training and Rest,” comes from Hozee Toresu/Jose Torres, a 1959 documentary—directed by Teshigahara—about a Puerto Rican boxer, filmed in New York City streets and gyms, for which Takemitsu provided jazz-inflected music. The second section, “Funeral Music,” comes from Imamura’s 1989 drama Kuroi ame/Black Rain, about a family living in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiorshima. The film won a raft of Japanese Academy Awards, including for Best Music Score.

In the final movement we again encounter Takemitsu using a surprising vocabulary. It is taken from Kii no Kao/Face