Benjamin Sabey and Michael Hicks, Music Theory and Composition
My object in researching the music of Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu with support from the ORCA grant was to distill from it those concrete organizing principles upon which rest a phantasmagoric, spontaneous music that seems to float freely from silence to silence.
This was a larger task than I had foreseen. Precious little of what I have been taught about music theory seemed to appear in the music of Takemitsu and he is very ambiguous in his own writing about is music. He has repeatedly voiced his distrust of western analytical practices. I nevertheless sensed a rigor and craft in his music that I found difficult to explain. I was hopelessly limited by my own inadequacies as a theorist and analyst. However, through the coarse of diligently studying his music, I felt that I began to absorb many of the principles of his technique on an intuitive level. I realized that I was not qualified or prepared to write a definitive statement on Takemitsu’s compositional technique but that, as a composer myself, I might be able to display my understanding of his music best by emulating it in a piece of my own. An assignment from the Aspen Music Festival and School to compose a piece for flute and guitar seemed a perfect way to kill two birds with one piece. The resulting composition is titled, Tern.
In writing this piece I focused most especially on Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, for flute and guitar, as a model. I shall out-line elements of Tern that seem to be derived from or influenced by Toward the Sea.
The harmonic vocabulary of Toward the Sea remains largely ambiguous to me, however, it is clear that a loose usage of the whole tone scale pervades the work. (The whole-tone scale is composed of successive whole steps. While there are twelve different major scales, one for each key, there are only two possible whole tone scales. They are often associated with the music of Debussy.) In Toward the Sea, we usually encounter the whole-tone scale with one note added. Since this note belongs to the other scale it may be used to pivot between the two. Switching from one whole-tone scale to the other can occur very rapidly in Toward the Sea. Through being immersed in Takemitsu’s music for so long I felt comfortable in approaching the harmonic aspect of Tern from a largely intuitive standpoint. I simply tried to write music that “sounded like” Takemitsu while keeping the idea of the imperfect whole-tone scale ever-present in the back of my mind.
I believe that the difficulty in analyzing Takemitsu’s music comes from the fact that he strives to make it seem improvised and spontaneous. The western method of faithful reproduction of precisely notated music is unique among the rest of the world, in which improvisation plays a much larger role. While Takemitsu’s music is usually precisely notated he seems to have written it largely through intuition. This method of composition tends to create music with out form, a clear beginning, middle and end. This is probably what Takemitsu wants in order to create the illusion of time-suspension (a typical aim of eastern music). There is, however, one important organizing principle that Takemitsu uses in Toward the Sea to impart to it some semblance of form. A brief motive that recurs throughout the piece gives the listener a kind of “mile-marker” that emerges out of the fog to allow the listener to orient him or herself. My piece was also composed in an intuitive manner with little thought of form or structure except for a brief motive that appears three times in the piece at the beginning, middle, and right at the end. Just as the motive in Toward the Sea comes near the end to signal eminent closure, my motive comes just before the last note.
The rhythmic component of Toward the Sea typifies Takemitsu’s practice of employing a fluid rhythm that speeds and slows like the ebb and flow of waves. He makes extensive use of ritardando and accelerando (directing the player to gradually increase or decrease the tempo). I wanted this same effect in Tern, but rather that using gradual tempo changes I simply notated the rhythms exactly. This makes for some fairly tricky rhythms but I don’t have to rely as much on the interpretation of the performer. In other words, if they play it as written it will sound right.
Other, subtle influences from Toward the Sea can be found in Tern which I believe will be apparent to the careful listener but which I have neither the space nor the ability to enumerate. The interested reader may obtain a recording of Toward the Sea and Tern by emailing me at bensabey@byu.edu.