MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Toru Takemitsu died ten years ago today, on February 20, 1996, in Tokyo, Japan, of pneumonia while undergoing treatment for bladder cancer. He was 65.

Takemitsu was born in Tokyo in October 1930 and spent part of his childhood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. During the final years of World War II he encountered Western classical music, and after the war immersed himself in composers including Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen and Arnold Schoenberg. Although he studied briefly with Yasuji Kiyose, he was largely self-taught.

Film soon became central to his career. His association with composer Fumio Hayasaka helped introduce him to the Japanese film industry, and in 1956 he co-wrote the music for Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit, an early landmark of the Japanese New Wave. The score’s jazz influences already revealed Takemitsu’s willingness to combine popular styles, avant-garde techniques, electronics and unconventional instrumental sounds.

During the 1960s he became one of the defining musical voices of Japanese cinema, collaborating repeatedly with directors Hiroshi Teshigahara, Masaki Kobayashi, Masahiro Shinoda and Nagisa Oshima. Takemitsu treated the entire soundtrack as a compositional object, often giving music, ambient noise, electronically manipulated sound and silence equal dramatic importance.

His work with Teshigahara produced some of his most distinctive scores. Woman in the Dunes (1964) used distorted electronic sonorities, percussion and shrieking, sliding strings to complement the film’s oppressive landscape, while The Face of Another (1966) juxtaposed its unsettling exploration of identity with an unexpectedly elegant Viennese-style waltz. For Kobayashi, Takemitsu scored films including Harakiri (1962), Kwaidan (1964) and Samurai Rebellion (1967). Harakiri prominently featured the Japanese biwa, while the ghost stories of Kwaidan inspired one of his most radical soundtracks, making extensive use of musique concrète and electronically transformed sounds.

His long collaboration with Shinoda was similarly adventurous, encompassing Pale Flower (1964), Assassination (1964), Samurai Spy (1965), Double Suicide (1969) and Silence (1971). Across these films Takemitsu moved freely between jazz, traditional Japanese instruments, chamber music, electronics and extended passages of silence. Takemitsu’s best-known international film score came through his collaboration with Akira Kurosawa. After Dodes’ka-den in 1970, the pair reunited for Ran (1985), Kurosawa’s epic adaptation of King Lear. Drawing on the monumental orchestral language of Gustav Mahler, Takemitsu created vast, tragic passages whose beauty contrasts starkly with the violence on screen. Equally important was his use of silence, allowing battle sounds and the natural world to dominate key sequences. The score brought him major international recognition. His later film work included Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989), Teshigahara’s Rikyu (1989), and Philip Kaufman’s Hollywood thriller Rising Sun (1993). By this period his music had become increasingly lyrical, although his fascination with unusual timbres, spaciousness and silence remained unmistakable.

Away from cinema, Takemitsu wrote more than a hundred concert works, including Requiem for Strings, November Steps and A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, and received numerous international honors. Yet film remained essential to his artistic identity. An obsessive moviegoer himself, he approached cinema not simply as employment but as an art form in which he could experiment with sound more freely than almost anywhere else.

Takemitsu was survived by his wife Asaka and their daughter Maki.