Japanese Garden Photo: Caroline Culler, CC BY-SA 3.0
Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was ambivalent about whether or not he consciously sought to blend Western and Eastern forms in his music, stating enigmatically that he wished to “swim in an ocean that has no east and has no west”. In this piece his lush, expressive scoring suggests a traditional Western neo-romantic model but his use of silence and space evokes Japanese formalist design principles.
