8 - Modernist apogee: the early 1970s

Summary

By 1970, the perception of Takemitsu as member of the international avant-garde had become sufficiently well established to receive the most elegant of symbolic confirmations. In that year a lavish world fair, Expo'70, took place in Ōsaka, and Takemitsu became closely associated with this paean to progress and modernism in several capacities. While his music for the film The Sun's Hunter played in the ‘Electrical Industry Pavilion’, an ambitious work for four soloists, female voices and two orchestras, Crossing, was being relayed over the sound-system of the ‘Space Theatre’ at the ‘Iron and Steel Pavilion’, alongside works by avant-garde stalwarts Xenakis and his Japanese pupil Yūji Takahashi. The soundsystem in this hall comprised a total of 1,000 loudspeakers, many of which could be moved either by hand or by electrical power, and Takemitsu's notes at the time certainly share some of the futuristic optimism implicit in this project – although at the same time, they also accord very much with his own personal aesthetics of musical space as revealed through his instrumental writing in general. ‘The conventionally arranged space of most halls initiates no movement, brings about no human experience (spatial or temporal) as a qualitative experience’, he noted. ‘Departing from the standard placement of former instruments, a free sound-source has become established, and the information supply has become pluralistic. Spatiality and spatial timbre … have been added as important parameters in the construction of music.’