Editor’s Note: For today’s post we’re joined by Tristan Pollack sharing a wonderful recording (a collaborative work) between Japanese pop star Seri Ishikawa and totemic composer Toru Takemitsu.
According to his bio: Tristan is a composer, musician, writer, born in Tokyo and based in New York City. He has scored original music for feature films and short films. He has done site-specific performances at the Rubin Museum of Art, Abrons Art Center, Losaida Art Center, and Westbeth Artists Community as well as many underground venues in the tri-state area.
His latest album under JUNÆ will be released by the Uruguayan tape label CAS records in a limited edition cassette. You can follow him on Instagram @tristanjunae or catch him on KPISS.FM on Paradise of Replica radio show.
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To speak of Toru Takemitsu’s life and work is a herculean task in itself. More so than any composer from Japan’s post-war generation, Takemitsu’s work resisted any easy classification. It seemed as though only a wraith could possess the sublime ability to synthesize and recreate timbre the way Toru Takemitsu did.
Takemitsu proved to be his own best teacher: he often stated in interviews that hearing French Chanson on the radio in his childhood was as foundational for him as his brief training with composer Yasuji Kiyose. His cosmopolitan curiosity drew him to circles outside of music, which led to joining the multimedia collective Jikken Kōbō (the Experimental Workshop) from 1951-1958. All the while, Toru began to make film scores for noted filmmakers like Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa, Ko Nakahara and Susumu Hani, given carte blanche to score in any musical style he saw fit.
The task of merging image to sound strengthened his ability to write in multiple idioms: he could write a Kurt Weill-esque ballad, then transition it to a simple symphonic theme, thereby transforming the song into a caustic, aleatoric, tape piece. These disparate worlds shaped his sensibility, ultimately setting him apart from many of his contemporaries. Now, what drew him into the bubble-gum pop world of Seri, we may never know. He may have sensed that Seri, too, rebelled against the very system that turned her into a pop sensation.
Seri made her synth-pop masterpiece Rakuen in 1985, and produced one of its most infectious melodies through her collaboration with Tetsuro Kashibuchi on the track “Desire“. Then, she wouldn’t produce another album for ten years…until she connected with Toru Takemitsu.
Seri’s instincts certainly served her well because what she found in Toru was water to her cetacean sonic journeys. This would lead them to a collaborative album Toru Takemitsu Pop Songs from 1995, which was Takemitsu’s first of two collaborations with pop star Seri Ishikawa (MI YO TA would be released in 2006 ten years after Takemitsu’s untimely death).
Perhaps what Toru saw in Seri was a splitting of two worlds, both literally and metaphorically. Seri was a product of Japanese and American parents. She possessed a rare quality during the idol boom, she was one of the few singers who could sing in Japanese, German, and English. The selection of songs explored here would be half made up of choir songs that Takemitsu composed several decades earlier in the ’60s. The rest would be jazz ballads and pop songs from numerous films that he’d scored.
“小さな空(Little Sky)”, “翼 (Wings)”, “三月のうた(March Song)”, “うたうだけ (Only Sing)”, “○と△の歌 (Song about Circles and Triangles)”, “恋のかくれんぼ (Hide and Seek of Love)” were all originally written for large choirs. My personal favorite of these is “Hide and Seek of Love”.
The ever restless Takemitsu was never late to popular trends. To stay hip by entering the world of synth-pop, he enlisted Miharu Koshi as arranger for “Hide and Seek of Love”. To kick off the song, Korg synths danced over a 808 drum machine. When Seri’s childlike voice enters, nothing is quite what it seems as her hide and seek chant is interrupted and disjointedly harmonized by jazz giant Masahiko Sato’s atonal improvisation on the piano. Here, the simple but ironic lyrics were written by none other than Toru’s old friend Shuntaro Tanikawa. Tanikawa and Takemitsu had already met in the late ’50s at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo where they formed Etcetera to Jazz no Kai [Etcetera and Jazz Circle] with many other radicals like Shuji Terayama and Norio Maeda.
“Hide and Seek of Love” ranks as the second most disconcerting love ballad by Takemitsu. The first is tied between “Face of Another” or “What The Dead Man Left Behind”.
Who would have thought that the man responsible for the caustic prepared piano in “おとし穴 (Pitfall)” could also write a bossanova tune? But that is precisely what Toru did with “死んだ男の残したものは (What The Dead Man Left Behind)” using lyrics by Shuntaro Tanikawa. Tanikawa and Takemitsu completely subverted the often buoyant syncopated breeze that is associated with bossanova music. Here, instead, a reflective dirge is created by Tanikawa’s stark lyrics, merging with a vi-V-IV-III descending chord progression by Takemitsu.
These macabre words can’t be translated precisely into English, but I made a rough translation that hopefully can bring wider appreciation into Takemitsu’s vocal based music:
死んだ男の残したものは
ひとりの妻とひとりの子ども
他には何も残さなかった
墓石ひとつ残さなかった
死んだ兵士の残したものは
こわれた銃とゆがんだ地球
他には何も残せなかった
平和ひとつ残せなかった
死んだかれらの残したものは
生きてる私、生きてるあなた
他には誰も残っていない
他には誰も残っていない
This is what the dead man left behind
A lonely wife and lonely child
He didn’t leave anything behind
He didn’t even leave a single tombstone.
This is what dead soldiers left behind
Broken guns and warped earth
They didn’t leave anything behind
Not even peace.
This is what dead men left behind
A living me, a living you
Nobody else remains
Nobody else remains.
What begins as a crushing anti-war song, evolves into a slight glimmer of hope. The contrasting imagery of a desiccated earth, and two lovers left alive, completely coalesce with Takemitsu’s numinous musings. Whether you understand Japanese, English or French, the context in which Takemitsu draws from can be understood by anyone.
Toru was just as voracious a consumer of cultures around the world, as he was with sound and noise. Toru Takemitsu Pop Songs is just that: a prism of emotions captured on tape.