Introduction

Summary

The title of this book is ‘The Music of Tōru Takemitsu’, and despite the many other fascinating issues, biographical and artistic, that it is tempting to explore in an examination of this many-faceted genius – composer, festival organiser, writer on aesthetics, author of detective novels, celebrity chef on Japanese TV – it is with Takemitsu's legacy as a composer that the following chapters are predominantly concerned. In fact, the book's scope is even narrower still, for although Takemitsu, as the worklist at the end of this volume will show, produced a vast amount of music for film, theatre, television and radio as well as a number of other pieces of more ‘populist’ character, such works lie beyond the remit of the present study, which for the most part deals only with the composer's ‘classical’ scores for the concert platform. Right from the start, however, it should be emphasised that such an approach focuses on only a small area of Takemitsu's versatile creativity, and it should always be borne in mind that these other areas of activity were an ever-present backdrop to his ‘mainstream’ work, interacting fruitfully with the latter in ways which it has been possible to hint at in the following pages, but – regretfully – not examine in more detail.

The bulk of this work, then – chapters 2 to 11 – is concerned with descriptions of Takemitsu's music for the concert room, examining the principal scores in roughly chronological sequence, and including a certain amount of biographical information to set them in context.