The composer adored Wagner and made pilgrimages to Bayreuth; he would sit captivated, his musical imagination sparked by the sounds of Tristan und Isolde. On a Tuesday evening one might find him sitting with the Symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, reading Baudelaire's translations of Edgar Allen Poe. And like many radical composers at any given time in history, he was an ardent fan of more conservative composers -- in his case it was Modest Mussorgsky and Edouard Lalo. Achille-Claude Debussy, born in 1862 into a line of artisans, was the unwitting architect of Impressionism, despite his disdain for the term. As a student, he was the enfant terrible, mistrustful of his teachers' narrow-mindedness and deeply cognizant of how they were straitjacketed by their own immutable views. He said, "I am more and more convinced that music, by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast into a traditional and fixed form... it is made up of colors and rhythms. The rest is a lot of humbug invented by rigid imbeciles riding on the backs of the Masters."
At the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, Debussy encountered the sounds of a Balinese gamelan orchestra -- and Wagner's spell was broken. The music was startling, exotic and dreamy, nebulous and intangible; its effect on Debussy was profound. Like the Impressionist painters of his time, Debussy learned to use color and atmosphere to his advantage, creating mellifluous, airy textures. In 1894, he composed Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (after a poem by Mallarmé). The music seemed to be suspended in mid-air, melodies rising to the surface like a rich, distinctive perfume. Sensation and illusion replaced the conservative realism of his teachers, and Impressionism took hold. In the words of Pierre Boulez, "just as modern poetry surely took root in certain of Baudelaire's poems, so one is justified in saying that modern music was awakened by Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun."
Those who had grown to love the nebulous atmospheres of Debussy's earlier works were suddenly wondering if this signaled a change of style.
Then, in 1905, came La Mer -- and the critics were left wordless. Straddling the line that separates Debussy's earlier, phantasmagorical scores from his more Classical-sounding compositions, La Mer was not the dreamy Impressionistic music for which he had become so famous. The delicate, euphoric melodies that were so pervasive in works like Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun had now been pushed aside in favor of more muscular writing and symphonic themes. Those who had grown to love the nebulous atmospheres of Debussy's earlier works were suddenly wondering if this signaled a change of style. It did -- and then again, it did not. As before, harmony and melody were in constant flux, defying any attempt to attach the music to some kind of classical form -- hence Debussy's aversion to the notion that he was an "Impressionist" composer in the truest sense.
Impressionism found a latter-day home in the music of two of the 20th century's most individualistic modernist composers: Oliver Messiaen, whose personally developed approach towards harmony has its roots in Debussy, and Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), who claims both Debussy and Messiaen as his primary influences. In Riverrun, Takemitsu offers the listener an opportunity to rethink the sound of the piano with an orchestra -- and reveals with obvious flair his deep connection to La Mer.
In speaking of his approach towards composing, Takemitsu once stated that if he was asked to write a twenty-minute piece, he would start by going for a walk in the garden for twenty minutes. If he came upon a rock, his response would be to compose "rock music" and if he happened upon a tree, then he would compose "tree music;" if the rock were in front of a tree, then he would place the "rock" music on top of the "tree" music. Beautiful and simple! But misleading, for the music and the personality of Toru Takemitsu are far more complex.
Takemitsu had found a way to cast the Impressionist sound world into a modern, atonal style.
Mostly self-taught, Takemitsu was an Eastern composer who initially chose to reject traditional Japanese aesthetics in favor of abstracting the major trends of Western modern music. In 1951 he came together with other musicians and artists and formed Experimental Workshop (Jikken Kobbo) to create mixed-media projects. Takemitsu's music followed suit, becoming fragmented and preoccupied with the atonality of the 1950s European avant-garde. In the mid-1960s, he met the American composer John Cage, whose interest in Eastern culture was deep and life-long; Takemitsu was then inspired to reexamine the traditional music of his own culture. The result was a series of works scored for traditional Japanese instruments alongside Western concert instruments -- all framed by a musical vocabulary that was increasingly amorphous in nature. In fact, his evolving style was oftentimes a richly dissonant, more motionless -- more Zen-like -- version of Debussy. Takemitsu had found a way to cast the Impressionist sound world into a modern, atonal style.
As with Debussy, notions of water and the sea stirred Takemitsu's musical imagination. In Riverrun for piano and orchestra (1984), he captures the spirit of Debussy's La Mer with a perfect blend of dark, atmospheric harmony and muscular orchestration. Inspired by James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the composer writes: "The music flows in the form of a musical tributary derived from a certain main current, wending its way through the scenery of night towards the sea of tonality." A vibrant landscape for piano and orchestra, Riverrun presents a relationship between piano and ensemble that is both complementary and reactive; as in Debussy's La Mer, the music moves with an emotional ebb and flow that mimics the push and pull of the water's current. The piano writing casts a romantic spell, sounding like Impressionistic Chopin or Liszt; as always, Takemitsu creates a highly original form, an unusual overall shape, as sudden, explosive waves of sound appear and disappear unpredictably. In the end, like the thoughts of a sleepy man, the music slowly dissolves, resting on one single, fragmentary thought iterated by the piano.
In 1984, with the music for Ran, Akira Kurosawa's Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, Takemitsu's ability to bring a modern voice to traditional Japanese instruments brought him significant recognition as a composer of film scores (something he had been doing since the early 1960s). Had film been a presence in the time of Claude Debussy, he too might have become a sought-after film composer. For the ability to create abstract music with brilliant visual appeal is not to be taken for granted -- only a handful of composers have had such a gift.
© andante Corp. March 2001. All rights reserved.
