Art & Creativity Quote by Toru Takemitsu

Takemitsu’s line is a quiet shot across the bow at Western classical music’s most powerful superstition: that the “work” lives on the page, and performance is just a faithful delivery service. He’s not anti-notation so much as anti-idolatry. “Notes fixed on a piece of paper” becomes shorthand for a system that can confuse documentation with experience, architecture with inhabitation. For a composer who spent a lifetime navigating between Japanese aesthetics and European modernism, that distinction is political as much as poetic.

The phrase “natural emotions” can sound suspiciously universalizing, but in Takemitsu’s hands it’s less a claim about identical feelings and more a demand for permeability. Music should be porous enough to meet bodies where they are: breathing, listening, remembering. His point lands harder given the postwar context in which he came of age. Takemitsu encountered Western music through the radio during Japan’s wartime and occupation years, absorbing it as something both seductive and imposed. No wonder he insists on the human, the sensed, the immediate: it’s a refusal to let institutional technique replace contact.

Subtext: composition is not a static object but an event shaped by time, silence, timbre, and environment - the things notation struggles to pin down. Takemitsu’s own work, with its attention to color and ma (the charged space between sounds), argues that what matters often happens between the notes. The quote is a reminder that music’s authority doesn’t come from its paperwork; it comes from what it does to people.