The World’s Greatest Japanese

Toru Takemitsu (武満 徹) was a giant in international contemporary music. While writing music in the Western tradition, he preserved the legacy of Japanese cultural tradition and brought it into a remarkable synthesis with the Western and Japanese instrumentation and sounds.

Takemitsu gained the worldwide recognition as a composer when his Requiem for strings (1957) was hailed as a masterpiece by Igor Stravinsky in 1958 during his visit to Japan.