Music as Silence, Cinema as Dream: Toru Takemitsu's View of Film Music

Abstract

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) is one of the most famous Japanese composers from the era after World War II. He wrote a large amount of music for films and TV dramas, as well as concert pieces, so we can say that music accompanying a visual image is one of the kernels of his musical activity. In this paper, we attempt to examine his view of film music. It is true that silence is interpreted as the absence of sound, but for Takemitsu it was the matrix of sound. Silence is filled with innumerable sounds, and the flux of those silent sounds is what he calls the ＂stream of sound.＂ Therefore, his music composition was based on the act of listening for the instant when the sound comes into existence from the silence, and to the way that the sound sinks into the silence. Both silence and sound endure, so it may be said that he regarded as timbre the temporal transition of the sound; the timbre is the audible quality of sound which the silence has penetrated. Takemitsu considered cinema in relation to this silence. The visual image secretes silence and the silence connects the music with the visual image. Moreover, he said that cinema is a dream, so the dream plays an important role in his compositions for films. Indeed, in a dream, we can relate things which have no connection with each other in the real world. Therefore, the music creates an original approach to the visual image. For Takemitsu, silence linked the audible to the visible and surrounded the audio-visual world. It is not too much to say that his film music immerses the visible in silence.