Toru Takemitsu Composition Award

First I would like to say how honoured I am to be given this task of adjudicating the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. It was one of the most difficult things I can remember doing for many reasons. Because in most competitions, for instance if it was a painting competition, you will be able to see the painting; if it was for food (we have a lot of food programmes on the television in England), you can taste the food. It is different if you are given a score, which simply has hieroglyphics. It is a bit like these restaurants in Tokyo where you have imitation food in the windows, which tells you everything about it apart from what it tastes like. The taste has to be in your imagination. Looking at music without hearing it is very similar.

But, one day two large boxes arrived at my door which contained nearly 100 scores of complex orchestral music. Wearing an objective hat, it was my way of thinking that I had to look at these works without relation to what my inner preferences might be, that I had to look at them not in a subjective manner. How is one supposed to do this? Well, my plan was to look at each of these pieces irrespective of what I really thought about them, but to try to find a way into them, and to give them a chance without getting my musical personality in the way of them. Looking at music is what I do most of my life in a sense because when I compose a piece of music, I have the same problem. But in this case, it’s somebody else’s. I don’t altogether make decisions about them by simply not hearing them. I have other means of getting into the music as a composer.

So I decided to spend certain hours, maybe one or two hours, but at least give each piece of music 15 minutes of my intuition, and that’s what I did. When I had done this, which took about two months from receiving the scores to having looked through them once, it did turn out that with a lot of them I could make a hasty decision and simply reject them. In the end, I got them down to something like 40 pieces.
But, there was a problem. The problem was that, in my opinion, a lot of them were what you might call the same piece. They were expertly done, but very difficult to make a decision about one as opposed to another. That became a real problem for me. I categorized them and put them in two piles, and I’d like to describe the character/nature of these piles in a very general way. In short, there are two basic sorts – if I can be quite black and white about it. Of course, in creativity everything is not always that clear but to put my position into some sort of order, I have a sort of way of understanding it. To my left, there was what I called the “Rothko pile”. By Rothko, it was just a metaphor for me, and I didn’t mean that they were pieces of music trying to be Rothko. It was just my way of understanding it. I couldn’t find a name for the others, as the interesting thing about the other pile was that they were to some degree all different.
The works in the “Rothko pile” are often very dense pieces, multi-layered and with not a lot of evidence of “linear invention”, or melodic invention if you like. I don’t know whether it has become a sort of cliché of writing music in the world – I don’t know enough about it but as I’m here to be the expert, this is what I thought. Of the pieces you heard this evening, I would say that the first piece The Lark in Snow and the last piece SIGHS – hommage à Fryderyk Chopin were in the category of the “Rothko pile”.

Very quickly, I have to take off my objective hat and to be subjective. Because in the end, I want to hear the music that I like, and we can often categorize pieces by other people in the way I wish I’d written them, and there were elements of this within these pieces that I’ve chosen – not necessary the whole piece, but elements of the piece.

So the two pieces Zwei Landschaftsbilder and “CLOSE” to you to “OPEN” I put in the category of narrative pieces.
In the case of Ms. Huan Liu’s Zwei Landschaftsbilder, it’s strange that someone should write two pieces about a picture in a narrative way. It doesn’t matter – this is just an observation I made. When looking at this work, I detected a young hand, and I was correct. Titles are funny things to give pieces of music and often very difficult. I tend to think that something like Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, it is more interesting if you take the subject away from it, because if you have a subject, it becomes about the subject, but if you take the subject away, then it means more than the sum total of the piece.
Now that I have heard Ms. Liu’s piece and seen it, I think it’s a very well-heard piece, and full of a lot of invention. I have a big criticism about it – it seems to me that it’s like a piece in a permanent state of exposition. It’s never where you think it’s going to be next and it’s always surprising you with another sort of invention, but these inventions that come one after the other actually belong to each other and there are not like other pieces of music.

Regarding Ms. Nana Kamiyama’s “CLOSE” to you to “OPEN”, once again I also detected a young hand and I think I was correct in that. The way that the piece unfolds – which is very different to Zwei Landschaftsbilder – is that it has what you might call a sense of perspective in that it begins with a solo violin and piano, and somehow uses these instruments to give an extra perspective to the piece. They appear as characters during the course of the work.
But one of the important things that drew me to this piece is the mixture of atonal music/high chromatic music with simple harmony/tonal music. That is a very difficult thing to bring off and I thought it was done extremely well in this piece. And what it also demonstrated was a high maturity for the orchestra. It was very well heard for the orchestra, maybe in rather a traditional way, but a very good ear in the sense that with all the proliferation of what it has, it’s very clear what the journey of the music is.
In my time of teaching over the years, there’s one thing that very often pieces suffer from, and these two pieces suffer from what I’m going to describe as the question of putting the tempo mark at the beginning of a piece of music and simply sticking to it like a sort of metronome. It’s a question of actually listening to the music, and adjusting it so that there are nuances of tempo – I’m not talking about changes of tempo – and once you have that, it then influences the actual music you are writing. But if it is simply a chart, then it makes the music, as it did in this case, rather static.
In “CLOSE” to you to “OPEN”, it had an element in it which could have been on the point of humour. I thought the tempo marks were too slow to start with but then again there was an element of the waltz that repeated and I think there’s a better way of expressing this just in terms of tempo, giving conductor the opportunity to deal with the material.

Now I’ll move to the other two pieces which I call “frieze pieces” in the sense that they have an element of “stasis”. This doesn’t mean they don’t move but the difference between these pieces and the other two is that the movement is circular, like a wheel moving – a wheel might move/spin quickly but move slowly. That doesn’t mean there is no development in it.
In the case of Mr. Marcin Stańczyk’s piece SIGHS, the wheel gets quicker and moves over more ground. But the amount of ground is not the same as the speed of the wheel though.
The two pieces, SIGHS and The Lark in Snow, are in one sense minimal pieces. They take a lot out of traditional music and in anything minimal that you take out, you have to put something in to replace it. It’s a bit like when you take the cream from the milk, the milk doesn’t taste so good and you have to inject it with minerals in order to compensate what it isn’t there.

In the case of Mr. Sumio Kobayashi’s The Lark in Snow, if I can use the metaphor of the wheel, it is moving slowly and it gets a little faster and covers slightly more ground as it moves through the piece, whereas in SIGHS, the wheel is moving quicker and covering slow ground, but increasingly more. But more than that, it seems to me that it is a virtuoso piece in some respects: the proliferation of micro-moments of music which are really sort of piled on top of each other, but in a permeant state. When you pile one thing on top of another in music, you only hear one thing. For example, it is almost impossible to tell if it is four voices or five voices singing at the same time. By this, I’m not suggesting one shouldn’t do what he has done, but what you get as the sum total is another sort of “oneness”. Nevertheless, it is a virtuoso piece of musical awareness.
Whereas Mr. Kobayashi's The Lark in Snow which is to my mind a piece of poetic extremism, does the opposite. He has pared his material down to very little, and it is very beautifully heard. The use of the flute as a different voice and nothing else apart from the strings is one of the important elements of the piece. To say one little word about it, I also thought the tempo of that piece was a little bit too fast for it.

So, I have to give you my decision. I would like to give a joint third prize to the two pieces, “CLOSE” to you to “OPEN” and Zwei Landschaftsbilder. To the piece The Lark in Snow, I would like to give second prize, which means SIGHS – hommage à Fryderyk Chopin is the winner of the competition. Thank you.