Toccata - Homage to Toru Takemitsu

(Version 2022)

The delicate sound universe and the diverse extra-musical sources of inspiration in Toru Takemitsu’s music were the starting point for this homage to the great Japanese composer. 

However, the intention was not to write music that imitates ‘Takemitsu’s world’ or that creates a fictitious ‘orientalism’. DEFINITELY NOT!

The personal life vision and the honoree's own example move and motivate to respect and rigour of research “beyond the length of the hands” - as an inspiring piece by singer-songwriter Sílvio Rodriguez puts it. Here it is meant in a double sense, because the piece was intended to be technically challenging from the beginning. But the compositional approach also refers in some way to this poetic saying.

The themes of constellations, dreams, numbers, water, literature, painting, the exploration of new worlds, etc., have been grooves in Toru Takemitsu's poetic wellspring that have been newly assimilated by me here.

An elaborate system that re-explores the organisation of sound and is closely linked to linguistic principles constituted my technical toolkit.

Samuel Beckett's ‘Waiting for Godot’ served as my literary source. He has been an author who has created, astonishingly, images (pictures) of contemporary life. And ‘Waiting for Godot’ is, as Beckett himself commented, a “horribly comic” vision of anguish, grotesque solidarity, and many metaphysical implications, etc., which makes use of the best features of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ - dramatic actions reduced to a minimum, truncated dialogue, gestures that belie words, the very bareness of the stage and the heightened symbolism of each element, movement and repose, the imperative of speech and the impossibility of silence, etc. - to take us to “the very edge of an experience of beauty that shines at the limits of the word and of the human”.

For the composition of Toccata the following procedure has been adopted:

Act One of ‘Waiting for Godot’ (“piéce en deux actes”) has been subdivided into three sections, from which several quotations have been taken. Each particular section is characterised by a basic system of sound organisation. Furthermore, the individual sections are denoted by symbolic references to dreams, numbers and water.

Thus, the musical-dialectical development and structuring of the various moments of the composition is closely connected to the selected linguistic and acoustic contents.

In addition, some elements of Gagaku Music have been used as subtleties, moving away from mere ‘textual quotation’ and were integrated into the composition's own content.

Takemitsu once commented: “I would really like to compose a piece in Allegro, but I find it impossible for me because I am Japanese. I think Japanese has no sense of Allegro”. So, this Toccata in an Allegro tempo, for him. 

This composition manifests a wide variety of influences to expand the idiomatic expressive possibilities of the instrument, “beyond the length of the hands”.

Sef Albertz