The image of a Japanese garden in the art of Toru Takemitsu

Abstract

Musical landscape painting is an important component of the image world of the works by the outstanding Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. The problem of the root connection of his work, like many modern composers, with the foundations of his culture determined the subject of research - the image of the Japanese garden, which occupies a special place in the archetypal imagery of the land of the rising sun, in the context of which the garden is a special symbolic space connecting all natural elements – air, water, earth, heaven. The Japanese garden is one of the most important artistic phenomena of traditional creativity, within the framework of which its architectural, plastic and picturesque views are combined. The musical analysis of the works embodying the “garden metaphor” presented in the article is aimed at identifying a system of techniques through which a special coloristic, sonorous, timbre multicoloration, textural flexibility and spatial multidimensionality of Toru Takemitsu’s compositions dedicated to garden themes are achieved. The result of their parallel action is the effect of visualizing the musical space. These observations argue for a high degree of embeddedness of musical ideas and stylistic features of Toru Takemitsu in the system of fundamental artistic phenomena of Japanese art.