An art house favorite, Toru Takemitsu had a troubled youth that was interrupted prematurely due to World War II. Drafted into the Japanese army at the young age of 13, he was extremely bitter at the situation he was stuck in, only finding refugee in exploring Western music, which was banned in Japan at the time. After the war, Takemitsu took up work for the US Armed Forces before becoming very ill and bed ridden. Hospitalized, Takemitsu took the opportunity to experience as much Western music as he could, finding sanctuary in the melodies and distancing himself from traditional Japanese music that, he later stated, reminded him of his time in the war.
At only 16, and heavily influenced by the Western music he had enjoyed, Takemitsu began to compose his own work. While 17 years old, he studied briefly under composer Yasuji Kiyose, but for the most part was self-taught and by 1948 had already started experimenting in electronic music. In 1951, Takemitsu became a founding member of the experimental workshop "Jikken Kobo", an artistic group who sought to avoid Japanese artistic tradition while broadening their scope by introducing audiences to the work of Western composers. During this time, Takemitsu began studying with Toho composer Fumio Hayasaka, best known for his work on numerous Akira Kurosawa films.
After Hayasaka tragically passed away in 1955, Takemitsu began to work on his "Requiem" for string orchestra in homage to the late composer. Heard by famous Russian composer Igor Stravinsky in 1958, Stravinsky publicly praised the work while meeting and congratulating Takemitsu. It wasn't much later that Takemitsu soon received a commission for work from the Koussevitsky Foundation, launching international recognition for the budding composer.
Around this time, Takemitsu had also begun a career as a film composer, first conducting the score for Crazed Fruit by director Ko Nakahira in 1956. The composer produced work primarily for Shochiku until the early 1960's, when he branched out working with Toho and other studios on films such as Wonderful Bad Woman (1963). This era saw a lot of change in Takemitsu's style of work, influenced by an unlikely source in American electronic musician John Cage who inadvertently convinced Takemitsu to embrace traditional Japanese music that he had for so long avoided. Its influence on his work was immediate, heard in movies such as Kwaidan (1964) to fuse the unearthly with a distinctly more Japanese style of scoring.
As Takemitsu's fame and fortunes rose, the composer became more selective in his film work. Gravitating toward the art house films that one would expect to associate with the avant-garde community that Takemitsu was so involved in, adapting his multi-talented scoring techniques to change with his movie projects, from the unnerving score for The Petrified Forest (1973) to the very classical score to Glowing Autumn (1979).
Although quite active in the 1980's, including his Japanese Academy Award winning score for Ran (1985), Takemitsu was reducing his film output up into the 1990's, although making exceptions for movies such as the Sean Connery starring Rising Sun and the Yoshiko Tanaka starring Black Rain. Sadly, at age 66, Takemitsu passed away in 1996, working at the time on creating his first opera. He is remembered today through the "Toru Takemitsu Composition Award", which seeks to honor upcoming composers who might one day mold new musical styles. |