At first glance Toru Takemitsu's November Steps, composed in 1967 for the New York Philharmonic's 125th birthday, would seem to exemplify the inevitability of Oriental/Occidental musical exchange in the age of global communication and commerce. After all, it counterpoises against the lush, booming sound of the Western orchestra two soloists playing exotic instruments from his native Japan: the shakuhachi flute and the lute-like biwa. Takemitsu presents this not as a diplomatic gesture, however, but rather a dialectical one. "Sometimes these two worlds of East and West envelope me with gentleness," the composer confided to musicologist Luciana Galliano in 1995, "but more often than not they tear me apart. What I try to do is to follow both directions. I wish not to find a resolution to this creative paradox, but to bring the two opposing sides into conflict." The concerto would seem the perfect genre to depict this tension: its connotation of the individual apart from society, the few against the many, taken to embody the position of a composer both admittedly self-conscious about his own native musical tradition and never fully at home in his adopted idiom.

This approach lends the piece a palpable energy. The two sides rarely seek to find common ground, but rather emphasize the borders of their own and each others' idiomatic profiles. Those borders, it should be noted, expand exponentially in the hands of Takemitsu, who elicits from the ensemble and soloists a seemingly unending supply of new sonorities. Throughout the piece's 11 sections (or "Steps," the term in the title corresponding roughly to a word akin to "movement" in the Japanese classical tradition), though a few structural aspects of the piece are left variable, the moment-to-moment details are deliberately conceived and notated with painstaking detail. Every sound in the composer's universe, then, is a designed and created entity. The biwa, with its pointed attack, abundant overtones, and quasi-percussive possibilities finds challenge in the orchestra's timbral agility, while one of the shakuhachi's intonational nuances might send shimmering, dissonant ripples across the strings. In performance, these reactions and interactions take on an almost theatrical element: the orchestra is distributed in an unusual fashion around the stage behind the soloists, lending a spatial aspect to the translucent layers of highly individualized elements that fill the score. They also assume a careful pace, as Takemitsu interpolates his surreal, apparitional sonorities with pensive, heavy silences.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.