An Avant-Garde Spirit Born During Postwar Reconstruction
An essential starting point for Toru Takemitsu's creative career was his activity with Jikken Kōbō, or the Experimental Workshop, founded with poet Shuzo Takiguchi and others in the early 1950s. Amid postwar disorder, Takemitsu had no formal music education and independently immersed himself in jazz, modern French music, and the avant-garde. Born in Tokyo in 1930 and spending part of his childhood in Manchuria, he reached the end of the war as a boy and first encountered Western music through broadcasts for the occupation forces.
He was particularly struck by the chanson “Parlez-moi d'amour,” an experience said to have confirmed his decision to live through music and significantly shaped his artistic outlook. Although he studied composition with Yasuji Kiyose, Takemitsu's interests moved toward experimental expression beyond existing musical frameworks. He began the postwar period rejecting what was Japanese, but that very reaction led to his later original aesthetic of uniting East and West.
Jikken Kōbō was a group devoted to experimental, interdisciplinary art across music, images, and dance. For Takemitsu, it opened the door to a total art extending beyond music production. Through it, he worked with electronic music and musique concrète, releasing his first tape piece, Relief Statique, in 1955. Its collage of recorded environmental sounds and noise laid a foundation for his later experiments in film sound.
An Experimental Fusion of Image and Sound
Jikken Kōbō prompted Takemitsu to think fundamentally about the relationship between images and music. Conventional music unfolds along a timeline, while the workshop emphasized the spatial placement of sound and synchronization with visual elements. Takemitsu learned that music could create new territory through organic connections with other art forms rather than existing alone.
From 1955, Takemitsu also began composing for radio and television and working in film music. He had experimented with music for the documentary Hokusai (1952), among his earliest film efforts, though the piece was not used. Even then, he held an original view of music's role in relation to images. He said film music should extend what the director feels and communicate emotions invisible to the audience, seeking a connection with the image deeper than background music.
His experience at Jikken Kōbō became a source of innovation in film music. He later used musique concrète effectively in Woman in the Dunes and Kwaidan, producing distinctive soundscapes that fused environmental and instrumental sound. His concept of spatial sound also culminated in placing musicians apart onstage for Woman in the Dunes. The resulting three-dimensional effect expressed the dunes' silence and confinement.
A Musical Dialogue Between East and West
As Takemitsu learned Western avant-garde techniques through Jikken Kōbō, he also gained a new perspective on traditional Japanese music. Though he initially rejected what was Japanese, he eventually became interested in the sound of Noh, gagaku, and other traditional forms. This was not nostalgia but an inquiry into acoustic phenomena that Western musical logic could not explain.
Takemitsu created an original sound using Western orchestras alongside Japanese and folk instruments and even electronic sound. In Harakiri, for example, he recorded, modulated, and processed the biwa, using it for dissonance and reverberation. In Kwaidan, he layered recordings of water drops and wind over orchestral resonance, creating an uncanny space in which melodies from traditional biwa and shakuhachi intersect with electronic effects.
This East–West fusion emerged from the workshop spirit of expression unconstrained by existing frameworks. Takemitsu also experimented by extending traditional instrumental techniques. In Woman in the Dunes, he used string glissandi and col legno—the technique of striking strings with the wood of the bow—to create dissonant, rough textures. His freedom in combining such avant-garde methods with traditional instruments and orchestra was praised as a fusion of tradition and innovation and made his music unique.
Toru Takemitsu as a Total Artist
Jikken Kōbō helped Takemitsu grow beyond a composer into a total artist. His approach to film music was intensely image-oriented. He became involved at the screenplay stage and exchanged ideas closely with directors and screenwriters. His close friend, director Hiroshi Teshigahara, recalled that Takemitsu was more than a composer and participated deeply in every aspect of the work, including the screenplay, casting, location scouting, editing, and total sound design.
Although a musician, Takemitsu thus sometimes shared a director's viewpoint and designed the relationship between image and sound as a whole. On Pitfall, he was credited as music director and conducted an avant-garde experiment in which he involved other composers, including Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yuji Takahashi, to add sound to images through improvisation. It put his interdisciplinary workshop experience into practice.
Takemitsu's innovations in film music could not have emerged without his avant-garde activity at Jikken Kōbō. The aesthetic of empty intervals, experimental sound methods, and fusion of Eastern and Western culture cultivated there came to fruition in his later scores. Takemitsu died in 1996 at age 65, having composed music for more than ninety films and left his original sound design in film history in Japan and abroad. His achievement bridged avant-garde art and commercial cinema and greatly expanded film music's artistic possibilities. His workshop experience was the force that led Toru Takemitsu to become one of the twentieth century's defining film composers.
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