Tōru Takemitsu (武満徹, Takemitsu Tōru ), born in 1930 and died in 1996, was a type-setter Japan board.

Biography

Tōru Takemitsu was born the October 8th 1930 with Tokyo. He studied the music with Yasuji Kiyose. He discovered the Western music during the second world war, and impassioned himself consequently for the French music (Claude Debussy, Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen), inter alia.

Its relation with the Japanese musical tradition remains on the other hand more complex: rejecting initially, Takemitsu will take truly conscience of the stature of the Japanese traditional music in 1958, following a representation of Bunraku (puppet show). The influence of Japan does not stop with the music (musical style and use of traditional instruments) but extends to its attachment for nature: November Steps (1967), I Hear the Toilets Dreaming (1987), How Slow fox trot the Wind (1991)… It made honor with the culture of its native land with ln year Fall Garden (1973-79) for an orchestra of Gagaku.

Often regarded as a " pont" between the cultures Japanese woman and Western (role that it forever desired to play), it seems that Takemitsu well more wished to exceed the old opposition East-Occident, to lead to a universalization of all the cultures, without real demarcations between them.

Takemitsu composed a very great quantity of film musics such as that of very famous the Ran of Akira Kurosawa with which it has several times collaborated, but also of Kwaidan of Masaki Kobayashi, largest production of the Japanese cinema of the time, and Empire of passion of Nagisa Ōshima.

He was the leader of the Japanese classical music what was worth to him to receive very many prices and to be selected in 1971 as principal type-setter of the international Semaine of modern music to Paris with some Igor Stravinski.

He dies in Tokyo the February 20th 1996 of a cancer.

Works

• List of works of Tōru Takemitsu

External bonds

• Biography on Radio France