Toru Takemitsu - Asterism/Requiem/Green/The Dorian Horizon
released on LP in 1969
All pieces performed by the Toronto Symphony with Seiji Ozawa conducting.
Yuji Takahashi plays piano on Asterism.
Painting on cover is Green Target by Jasper Johns.
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voice that belies little formal education, Takemitsu is polite, laconic, articulate, apparently guarded if not entirely withdrawn.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.
...
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.
Requiem, comparatively, is a conservative work with a chromatic vocabulary - not intended, when undertaken, to be specifically memorial, though profoundly colored by the death of a close friend during its composition. Green (November Steps II) was written in 1967 on commission from N.H.K., the Japanese national broadcasting system, concurrently with November Steps that the New York Philharmonic had requested for its 125th anniversary season. Takemitsu was studying Debussy's Jeux - "from a wish to enter into the secrets of Debussy's music, which never ceases to exert a strong influence on my music." He has called Green "an intermezzo ... a very peaceful piece ... music for children, dedicated to my daughter and to the daughters of my friends." The title derives not as some have supposed from Debussy's song but from the foliation of spring as he composed the two November Steps of buds into young leaves. Green was introduced to North America on October 29, 1968, also by Ozawa and the Toronto Symphony.
The Dorian Horizon, for 17 strings in two spatial groups, was written in 1966 for the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and bears a dedication "to the memory of Sergei (sic) and Natalie Koussevitzky." Dorian applies here to the Greek mode upon which the work is based: Horizon refers both to the dimly sighted past from which the mode survived and to the farthest visible distance in contemporary man's eyes. The first instrumental group (two each of violins, violas, cellos and double basses) forms an inverted "V" close to the conductor's podium and plays Eight Harmonic Pitches, echoed by the second group (six violins and three double basses, in two rows) from as far away on the stage as possible. Except where specified - and then sparingly - the Eight Harmonic Pitches and the Nine Echoes are played without vibrato. Thus does Time, past and future, combine with Space, behind and forward, to become the Present in this musical enunciation of the fourth dimension. (Roger Dettmer)
Tracklisting:
Side 1
1. Asterism {11:28}
for piano and orchestra
2. Requiem {7:30}
for string orchestra
Side 2
1. Green {5:29}
for orchestra (November Steps II)
2. The Dorian Horizon {8:53}
for 17 strings
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