Toru Takemitsu Toward The Sea Pdf 26
Matt Dreher
In its rewritten form, which hews closely to the original, Takemitsu dedicated Litany to his friend Michael Vyner, the late artistic director of the London Sinfonietta. The silent darkness and melancholy of the first movement are rarely interrupted by an ascending sound that towers toward heaven, as opposed to the celestially radiant colors of the second movement.
Jennifer Montbach Indeed. And, you know, he really felt a push and pull between his Japanese heritage and his American life. Early in his career, he really distanced himself from Japanese influence, but he was drifting back towards tonality and Japanese influence when he wrote this piece. Actually, it was commissioned by Greenpeace for its Save the Whales campaign.
But within such a stringent framework, the music is anything but predictable. Cracking wood in the film's opening segment becomes transformed from a sound recognizably organic into something menacingly alien. Spectral atmospherics increasingly infect the strict idiom of classical Japanese biwa playing as the introduction of "Hoichi the Earless" approaches its tragic conclusion and the sung tale transitions from historical account towards the ghost realm Hoichi will soon encounter first-hand. The swarm of jarring notes in which poor Hoichi's attack culminates provide a violent syncopated counterpoint to the visual rhythms onscreen, while what sound like instrumental jump-cuts during "In a Cup of Tea" mimic the ghosts' onscreen disappearing/reappearing act.
What impressed me about this work, which consists of the juxtaposition of prolonged chords, is the extremely detached attitude taken by the composer towards the sounds. The composer is standing outside of the sounds, neither involved nor intoxicated with them, observing them with serene eyes, and placing them calmly on the canvas of time. Each chord appears to be, though embracing rich linear movements within it, static in nature, and never serves to form any directional progression through its harmonic structure. The overall form of the piece, which is but mere juxtaposition of three blocks with no teleological orientation, is non-directional, never suggesting any developmental or narrative discourse. This music stands still quietly in front of the listener, as if it were something extrinsic to human being. This speculation on the work may sound idiosyncratic to most of the public. Still, this is how I found the piece.
Pratt, A.C. (2016). Music rights: towards a material geography of musical practices in the 'Digital Age'. In: Hracs, B., Seman, M. & Virani, T. E. (Eds.), The Production and Consumption of Music in the Digital Age. (pp. 206-222). USA: Routledge.
Film music serves many purposes in supporting the visual media by setting the mood, location, or time-period, suggesting a principal ethnic group, reinforcing action, offering contrary information, and drawing attention away from undesirable visual images. Film scores borrow from well-known pre-existing music to suggest location, time, and ethnic groups. In John Cromwell's Of Human Bondage, the music switches from "La Marseillaise" to "British Grenadiers" to signal the main character's change in location. Film score composers allude stylistically to ethnic folk music idioms to suggest a particular group of people. These idioms are often spuriously employed through the repetitious use of a particular convention, such as a pentatonic scale, gongs, and temple bells to signify Chinese traditional music, or heavy drumbeats and chanting for Native American music. Film music composers often model compositions on stylistic conventions of a given period in Western art music. Max Steiner's score for The Informer, set in Ireland during the 1920s, borrowed the Irish traditional tune, "The Minstrel Boy," Miklos Rozsa's score for Ivanhoe reflects the film's setting through the music of French troubadours, and Elmer Bernstein's score for The Ten Commandments draws on the unique timbre of the ram's horn during the Exodus scene. Bernard Herrmann's score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad did not directly borrow the corresponding ethnic idiomatic music, but implied its use through the borrowing of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Early American film scores were often modeled on or borrowed directly from late nineteenth-century European composers, as Joseph Carl Breil's score for the 1915 Birth of a Nation used Richard Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries." Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson influenced the move towards sparse orchestration in later American film score composers by incorporating American folksongs. Jazz and popular music became frequent sources of borrowing in the 1940s, as did rock music from the 1950s through the 1970s in films as in Rock Around the Clock,Don't Knock the Rock, and The Twist.American Graffiti used rock music as background for stories of the turbulence and uncertainty of the period. Film score composers are now employing both rich symphonic scoring along with the "musical potpourri" of the silent film era.
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