Toru Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was the best-known Japanese composer of the twentieth century. Born in Tokyo, he was largely self-taught, and came to Western classical music by listening to the radio of the American occupation forces after the war. His Requiem for strings of 1957 first drew international attention, and ‘November Steps’ (1967), written for the New York Philharmonic, set the Japanese biwa and shakuhachi beside a Western orchestra. Debussy was a lasting influence, and Takemitsu’s later music is slow, finely coloured and often named after water, gardens and dreams. He also wrote around a hundred film scores, among them the music for Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’.