Dreamtime

In the often Western-centric world of classical music, Tōru Takemitsu achieved an extraordinary amount of success outside of his native Japan. While some of his contemporaries graced international concert stages (including Akira Ifukube and Yasushi Akutagawa), most people today associate Japanese classical music with either Takemitsu’s works or the film scores of Joe Hisaishi.

Takemitsu’s 1981 orchestral work Dreamtime — commissioned by the Nederlands Dans Theater — continued a four-decade trend of combining myriad influences. Takemitsu took philosophical and musical cues from sources native to Japan and imported from the West, including traditional musics like gagaku, bunraku, and noh, and the works of composers like J.S. Bach, Debussy, Messian, and Cage.

A writer and teacher as well as a composer, Takemitsu infused his personal philosophy into his compositions. His beliefs, which similarly combined influences from the East and West, valorized sound objects as they are, rather than as they fit into a whole. He made no distinction between “high” and “low” art and saw his art as extracted from a “stream of sound,” where the piece exists continuously in the aether, from he merely extracts a fragment. As Takemitsu described, “My music is composed as if fragments were thrown together unstructured, as in dreams. You go to a far place and suddenly find yourself back home without having noticed the return.”

While Takemitsu had been preoccupied with modernist and avant-garde techniques in the 1960s and early 1970s, a marked change happened in 1977.  His orchestral work A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden from that year began a trend in Takemitsu’s works towards a Neoromantic conception of tonality that had been lost in his earlier works. He described this shift in the score of his 1982 piece Rain Coming: “It was [my] intention to create a series of works, which like their subject, pass through various metamorphoses, culminating in a sea of tonality.” As such, many works from the late-70s on feature water as a recurring motive, with evocative titles like Toward the Sea (1981) and Rain Tree (1980) and a programmatic thread often literalized through tones. For example, throughout these works, Takemitsu uses the musical cryptogram “S–E–A” as a melodic fragment. (“Es” is E flat in German, and thus the motive is the notes E flat–E–A and its transpositions.)

Beyond the “sea of tonality” and Takemitsu’s “Waterscape” pieces, he also developed a preoccupation with dreams and numbers, leading to a cycle of pieces with “Dream” in their title in the 1980s. In his philosophy, dreams are undefined and ephemeral, and numbers are the antagonistic and conscious desire for form and structure. His “Dream and Number” pieces capture the fluidity of dreams into sound and color: “Through the absolute simplicity of numbers I want to clarify the complexities of the dream.”

Takemitsu’s Dreamtime builds upon this series of musical and philosophical concepts that he was grappling with at the time. Musical devices from his Waterscape and Dream and Number pieces — namely the S–E–A motive and the notion of the sea of tonality — are both present. Listen as the piece opens softly in pianissimo, offers clusters of sound, floats upon waves of undulating dynamics, and ultimately fades away on a pentatonic collection of string tones.

One final influence on the piece is the notion of “Dreamtime” or “The Dreaming,” which describes the cultural beliefs and mythologies of the Australian aboriginal people. While “Dreamtime” is a rich and intricate series of symbols and practices, this term generally describes an ancestral period when the land was inhabited by supernatural figures. Takemitsu takes this notion and combines it with his broader fascination with dreaming, summarizing the work as follows: “Just as a dream, for its vividness of detail, points to an unanticipated, unreal whole, so in this work short episodes hang suspended in seeming incoherency to form a musical whole.”

Dreamtime thus functions as a rich access point to Takemitsu’s broad range of philosophies, musical styles, and influences. Just as his “stream of sound” extracts musical segments from an implied whole, Dreamtime offers just a sliver that reveals much about Takemitsu as an artist, thinker, and human.

— Tanner Cassidy

Tanner Cassidy is operations manager for the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival. He holds a PhD in music theory from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has written program notes for the Music Academy of the West.