Dreamtime (Yume no toki)

Program notes

About the Work

‘Dreamtime’ was written to be danced. The Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián asked Toru Takemitsu for a score for his company, the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague, which commissioned the piece, and Takemitsu composed it in 1981. It was first heard in the concert hall, though: Hiroyuki Iwaki conducted the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra in the premiere in Sapporo on 27 June 1982. The Japanese title is ‘Yume no toki’.

The name comes from Australia. In a short note on the score Takemitsu wrote that while composing he was ‘intensely influenced’ by the Dreamtime, the body of myth handed down from generation to generation among Aboriginal Australians; one account links the piece to a visit he made to Groote Eylandt, off the coast of the Northern Territory, to see a large gathering of Aboriginal dancers, singers and storytellers. He did not try to imitate what he heard there. What he took was an idea about dreaming. A dream, he wrote, is vivid in every detail and yet adds up to a whole that nobody could have predicted, and so in this piece ‘short episodes hang suspended in seeming incoherency to form a musical whole’.

Dreams and water run through the titles of his music from these years: ‘Toward the Sea’ dates from the same year as ‘Dreamtime’, and ‘Rain Tree’, ‘Dream/Window’ and ‘I Hear the Water Dreaming’ followed. By then Takemitsu had left behind the sharper edges of his early avant-garde scores for a slow, luminous manner that owes a good deal to Debussy, a composer he had loved since he first heard Western music on the radio in post-war Tokyo. In Amsterdam the piece is also a homecoming of a kind, since it was a Dutch company that asked for it.

What to Listen For

The orchestra is large, but it almost never plays all at once and rarely plays loudly. Takemitsu asks for triple woodwind, including alto flute, cor anglais and bass clarinet, a full brass section, two harps, celesta, and three percussionists whose instruments nearly all ring rather than strike: glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, tubular bells, suspended cymbals, gongs and tam-tams.

Do not expect themes that are stated and developed. The piece, about fourteen minutes long, moves as a chain of short episodes. A phrase rises in the flutes or the strings, swells, and dissolves into the shimmer of harps and tuned percussion before the next begins, and some of these gestures come back, slightly altered, the way a place recurs in a dream. Takemitsu said that the small variations of rhythm and the changes of tempo are there to heighten ‘the sensation of floating’, and the easiest way in is to stop counting beats and follow the colours as they pass from one group of instruments to another.