# String Quartet (1950) by Fumio Hayasaka



## Tapkaara (Apr 18, 2006)

As I am sure many of you will remember, I am an ardent, vociferous proponent of classical music and composers from Japan. I feel that, in many ways, the Land of the Rising Sun remains a largely untapped resource for great music; so dominant was Toru Takemitsu in his day that he might as well have been the only composer to originate from Japan; the shadow that he cast was dark and deep and practically all of his fellow countrymen who were composers have had some trouble emerging from it at one time or another.

One of my favorite Japanese composers, and one of my favorite composers period, is Fumio Hayasaka (1914 - 1955). Hayasaka is best known in his country and in the West as the man who wrote several famous film scores, most notably for the director Akira Kurosawa. Rashomon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954) are probably the most famous of Hayasaka's film scores.

Certainly, I am well acquainted with his concert output as well. For years, I have been looking for a recording of his one and only String Quartet, which was written in 1950. It seems that it has never appeared on CD. Due to this, there was no place I've ever be able to hear it.

A few weeks ago, to my delight, it finally made its way to YouTube. The recording appears to have been made in 1958. It was recently broadcast on NHK Radio in Japan and the YouTube video containing the recording appears to be sourced from that broadcast.

I have already listened to it twice and I am blown away by it. It's a dark, pessimistic work. It is quite modern sounding, but it is tonal and occasionally drifts toward a somewhat Japanese-inspired sound. Listen to that unrelenting ostinato in the first movement. Wow. And check out the third movement, which, on a few occasions, seems to prefigure Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score by 10 years.

This is indeed an obscure work that has not been heard many times since it was first composed. I include the link to the video here and I'd be most curious to see what the rest of you have to say about this piece:


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

Tapkaara said:


> so dominant was Toru Takemitsu in his day that he might as well have been the only composer to originate from Japan; the shadow that he cast was dark and deep and practically all of his fellow countrymen who were composers have had some trouble emerging from it at one time or another.


I love the works and film music of Toru Takemitsu very much but I am doubtful that he was the sole dominating composer when he was young & his music new.
Director John Huston hired Toshiro Mayuzumi to write the music for the 1966 film *The Bible* (and also the '67 *Reflections in a Golden Eye*) based upon Huston's hearing an LP program containing Mayuzumi's Nirvana Symphony.
As popular as Takemitsu may have been, Takemitsu didn't score an American film until 1993's *Rising Sun* - so to my thinking Mayuzumi may have had a higher international profile during the 1960s than Takemitsu had.
By the 1990s, though, I do think record producers and labels began to proliferate Takemitsu's music to a much greater extent than previously - thus causing this 'shadow' the OP refers to.
Vinyl LPs from the 1960s offered more than Takemitsu on their programs of music by Japanese composers (such as the Odyssey label).

Thanks for highlighting the opus by Hayasaka, even though he has never been a favorite composer of mine (I like music by Masaru Sato better.  )


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## Tapkaara (Apr 18, 2006)

Prodromides said:


> I love the works and film music of Toru Takemitsu very much but I am doubtful that he was the sole dominating composer when he was young & his music new.
> Director John Huston hired Toshiro Mayuzumi to write the music for the 1966 film *The Bible* (and also the '67 *Reflections in a Golden Eye*) based upon Huston's hearing an LP program containing Mayuzumi's Nirvana Symphony.
> As popular as Takemitsu may have been, Takemitsu didn't score an American film until 1993's *Rising Sun* - so to my thinking Mayuzumi may have had a higher international profile during the 1960s than Takemitsu had.
> By the 1990s, though, I do think record producers and labels began to proliferate Takemitsu's music to a much greater extent than previously - thus causing this 'shadow' the OP refers to.
> ...


When Takemitsu's star begin to really rise, it was in the late 1950s due to the composition of his Requiem, which, coincidentally, was dedicated to Hayasaka. (Hayasaka served as an informal mentor to Takemitsu.) The piece caught the attention of no less than Stravinsky, who laid great praise on the work. Getting such an endorsement from the man who was seen by many as the greatest living composer is pretty consequential. This was a pivotal moment for Takemitsu; it certainly put him a big step ahead of his fellow countrymen on the international scene.

Yes, Mayuzumi was also quite popular in his day. You mentioned the exposure that he got for having scored The Bible. But certainly by the late 1960s, Takemitu's reputation as THE Japanese composer really began to solidify. In '67 he wrote his November Steps (one of his better work, IMO) after having been commissioned to do so by no less than the New York Philharmonic. Another major, high profile coup.

The most famous Japanese conductor of all time, Seiji Ozawa, once said this os Takemitsu (and I believe it was in the 1970s, but I could be wrong): "Finally Japan has produced a composer for a world audience." That is, in Ozawa's opinion, no Japanese prior to Takemitsu (and that includes Mayuzumi) was worthy of being heard on an international level; only Takemitsu was good enough to have earned the right to be heard outside of the archipelago nation. This statement, to me, represents one of the single most damaging moments in the history of Japanese classical music. Ozawa, who had a very prominent international platform sought only to share it with Takemitsu. Indeed, Ozawa performed Takemitsu's music internationally with some regularity and made some highly regarded recordings of how works, as well. Ozawa never gave other Japanese composers anywhere near the same amount of attention. He turned his back on them. He gave Takemitsu all the attention while giving the finger to everyone else. This further solidified Takemitsu's dominance

So, by the 90s, yes, the were more and more Takemitsu recordings coming out, but his reputation as THE Japanese composer had already been pretty well established some 15 to 20 years prior.

I do love Masaru Sato as well. He, too, was a student of Hayasaka!

As for my own opinions of Takemitsu, he is not my favorite Japanese composer by a long shot. He was a very thoughtful man and his theories about music are often quite eloquent...at least on paper. Putting his aesthetic into practice was not always as successful as one might hope. As well, his music often sounds too derivative of itself....he was not one who had a talent for variation, in my opinion, or at least he didn't feel it was that important.

For some reason, I think he is often at his most successful in his piano works. His style works very well on the keyboard. To this day I can't quite my finger on why that is, but perhaps I should start musing over that again.


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

Tapkaara said:


> Ozawa never gave other Japanese composers anywhere near the same amount of attention. He turned his back on them. He gave Takemitsu all the attention while giving the finger to everyone else. This further solidified Takemitsu's dominance


Even if this is true, there's other conductors besides Ozawa.

Apparently, the folks who produced this LP didn't get Ozawa's memo to release only Takemitsu:










I like Akutagawa, also ...


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