Tōru Takemitsu
“I Hear the Water Dreaming” for flute and orchestra

“I am enchanted by the mystery of water,” wrote Tōru Takemitsu in a 1980 essay, drawing an immediate connection to his own music: “My idea of musical form is one of fluid form. What I strive for is to create progressive transformations, slow changes that come and go like the waves of ebb and flow.” For hardly any other composer did nature play such a vital role as it did for Takemitsu, born in Tokyo in 1930. And water – whether as rain, sea, waves or river – holds a particularly prominent position in his oeuvre: no fewer than 25 of his works feature it in the title, including I Hear the Water Dreaming for flute and orchestra, written in 1986/87.

In this case, however, another source of inspiration came into play: the art of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, the Aboriginal Australians. In 1980, Takemitsu accepted an invitation to Groote Eylandt, the fourth-largest island off Australia’s northern coast. He was fascinated by the dances, songs, stories and ceremonies of the local communities, and under this impression composed the ballet music Dreaming for the Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián. During his stay, he also encountered visual art from Papunya, an artist colony in the Northern Territory. One painting in particular captivated him – it was titled Water Dreaming. “It refers to the ‘Dreamtime’, a myth that continues to live on among the Australian Aborigines,” he explained. “The painting is simple, yet full of mythological signs and symbols, and its visual language touched me deeply.”

Takemitsu translated the painting’s depiction of water into the role of the solo flute in I Hear the Water Dreaming. Just a few measures into the piece, the flute introduces a melodic formula that recurs throughout: “The entire work is composed of numerous melodic sub species and colourful embellishments derived from this theme,” Takemitsu noted. One might well be reminded of the flute part from Claude Debussy’s symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune – and that is surely no coincidence. For Takemitsu, a self-taught composer, Debussy was one of the great guiding lights. So was Olivier Messiaen, whose influence is perceptible in the harmonic language. The music seems almost impressionistic. Takemitsu presents fluid, natural sonic states and, although he employs a large orchestra, he never uses it forcefully. Instead, the sound ebbs and flows with the kind of alternation between silence and tone so characteristic of Japanese music. The flute part seems to dreamily reflect on fleeting visions; the percussion adds Asian accents with cymbals, glockenspiel and tam-tam, and the strings are at times allowed to luxuriate. In his later years, Takemitsu once claimed that he was, at heart, a Romantic composer. And in his final text, published a few weeks after his death in February 1996, he expressed the wish to swim through the sea like a whale, “without West and East”.