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Notes 59.1 (2002) 59-61



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Book Review

The Music of Toru Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu:
A Bio-Bibliography


The Music of Toru Takemitsu. By Peter Burt. (Music in the 20th Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [x, 294 p. ISBN 0-521-78220-1. $64.95.] Music examples, diagrams, bibliography, index.
Toru Takemitsu: A Bio-Bibliography. By James Siddons. (Bio-Bibliographies in Music.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. [200 p. ISBN 0-313-27237-9. $79.] Discography, bibliography, index.

The music of Toru Takemitsu is perhaps the most internationally famous twentieth-century oeuvre produced by a composer born and raised outside of what is commonly referred to as "the West."

Despite this music's acclaim and high profile in concert halls worldwide, however, real East-West divides have largely served to inhibit vigorous intercultural analysis of the music and frank discussions about his compositional methods and personal and professional motives. Further divisions constructed on the terrains of culture and racial identity/ethnicity by the musical establishments in both Japan and the West, in combination with Takemitsu's own often elliptical aesthetic and cultural ruminations and musical insights, have inhibited our understanding of his work.

Now, six years after Takemitsu's death in 1996, the time is ripe for thoughtful and multifaceted appraisals of his life and music. To be sure, Takemitsu's music is different; its multicultural provenance poses considerable challenges to listener and writer alike. But if Takemitsu is to achieve more than token membership in a twentieth- century musical pantheon populated by composers with genotypical features quite different from his own, if he is to be truly canonized, so to speak, then talk about him and analysis of his music must jump out of the well-traveled ruts which force him (well-intentioned and not) into categories of the exotic and "other" that characterize much thinking and writing about the man and his music. Two recent books prepare the way.

The Takemitsu bio-bibliography of James Siddons is a marvelously thorough and wonderfully organized work. In addition to its cogent and elegantly written biography, [End Page 59] his imaginative and highly useful general categorizations of works according to genre, instrumentation, and theme (figs. 1-9) complement beautifully the detailed performance, critical, and programmatic information given for almost every concert work. Particularly impressive are the ways in which Siddons clarifies relationships between works (self-borrowings, for example) and provides, where they exist, Japanese titles in Japanese characters. In addition to the book's comprehensive discography and multilingual bibliography, the section on Takemitsu's music for film and television provides a wonderful springboard for future Takemitsu research. This book is a must for any music library; all students of either twentieth-century Japan or Japanese music are deeply indebted to the author.

The Music of Toru Takemitsu, Peter Burt's detailed chronicle of the composer's career and summary of relevant Japanese and international history, makes fascinating reading. Although his book deals only tangentially with Takemitsu's film music, his comments nevertheless point the way toward some very fertile analytical and conceptual ground. Also of great interest is Burt's quite correct observation that—without discounting the powerful originality and attraction of the music—Takemitsu's rise to fame was partly the result of the convenient Western zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time during which the musical and intellectual communities had become increasingly fascinated with general, often misguided, ideas of "the East" and was in many cases actively searching out non-Western spokespeople and traditions for admiration, emulation, and appropriation (p. 236). As a non-Western composer with undeniable musical gifts, and—though Burt does not say so—one with an equally undeniable self-promotional talent for taking full advantage of the West's penchant for its constructed "inscrutable East," Takemitsu's persona and musical aesthetic were in the right place at the right time.

Unfortunately, however, Burt's acute historical and biographical insights and observations cannot fully compensate for the book's extremely limited range of musical and analytical inquiry. For whatever reason, Burt...

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