Tuesday Tones

Staying in Japan for the next while, we have a work by one of Japan’s greatest composers: Toru Takemitsu. He lived 1930 to 1996, and he was also wildly productive: he composed a huge and prolific amount of music, and he also wrote extensively on music. One cannot consider oneself acquainted with Japanese music without knowing about Toru Takemitsu. Takemitsu is many things: an avant-garde composer, a proponent of Japanese folk instruments, an admirer of Western modern music. All of that, and more, blended in his work, which is always pictorial and fascinating.

This work appealed to me directly for obvious reasons: it is titled Orion And Pleiades. Written in three movements for cello and orchestra, the work is most definitely modernistic and governed by mood than by melody or traditional form. Is it a musical depiction of these constellations? Or is it a meditation on the feeling of looking into that sky and seeing those constellations hanging in the winter sky? Who knows?