10 - Towards the sea of tonality: the works of the 1980s

Summary

A Flock Descends marked a significant watershed in Takemitsu's work. Something of its musical language had already been glimpsed in earlier pieces, but these had not, in the end, announced the inauguration of a new simplicity in the composer's discourse: Green had been followed by Asterism, Quatrain by Waves and Bryce. After A Flock Descends, however – with the exception of the delayed première of the Gémeaux project – there was to be no turning back to the ‘modernist’ style with which Takemitsu had been preoccupied in the earlier part of the decade. This time, the work's glowing sensuality was to prove no temporary aberration from the true path, but instead embodied an aesthetic that would preoccupy Takemitsu for more or less the remainder of his career. His ‘third period’ had begun.

The 1980s were the years in which this new style was to be refined and consolidated. As Poirier has pointed out, they were years characterised by ‘an identity such as results from a long sedimentation’; years, furthermore, in which – for Poirier at least – Takemitsu's writing progressively takes on the character of the ‘post-modernism’ prevalent at the time. Poirier does not explain precisely what he means by this problematic and much-abused term, and significantly the composer himself – as we shall see later – preferred to categorise his later manner as ‘Romantic’; but nevertheless, one can certainly assert that Takemitsu's compositions from henceforth, at least relative to his own earlier work, would become ‘postavant-garde,’ ‘post-experimental’ – in other words, would constitute his own response to the decline of modernism as the dominant aesthetic of new music.