Toru Takemitsu's work In an Autumn Garden (1973) for gagaku - Japanese court music - offers a unique perspective of the influences on his music. Scholars suggest that, compared to his works written for Western instruments, this piece expresses Japanese aesthetics in a more explicit way; the very sonority recalls Japanese tradition. They tend to consider it as Takemitsu's most extreme incursion into his own cultural milieu. However, a deeper analysis of the work reveals that many aspects of In an Autumn Garden's discourse are closely related to Western compositional practices of modern music.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that, although expressed in a traditionally Eastern musical idiom, In an Autumn Garden is structurally organized according to a Western musical conception. For this purpose, I have adopted an approach that involves both theoretical aspects of gagaku performance and analytical tools from contemporary music.

A close analysis of texture and harmonic vocabulary of the work demonstrate the reappearance of compositional techniques of Takemitsu's previous works. These techniques are not always related to Japanese aesthetics. On the surface, it seems Takemitsu struggled to impose his own musical language in gagaku. However, while deliberately maintaining the performing techniques and inflections of gagaku, he decided to express his musical style on a deeper level, in the structure of the composition. His approach to the texture is one example. Although In an Autumn Garden highlights occasional melodic lines, it is basically a study of nuances of tone color. Timbre is also a concern in traditional Japanese music, but in gagaku, it is not expressed through texture. In gagaku, the texture consists of layers of sound in which specific instruments, assigned to specific functions, sound within a fixed register. Takemitsu ruptures gagaku's stratified structure using Messiaen's conception of shifting timbral colors through harmony.

Ieda Bispo was born in Brazil and worked in her city (Londrina) as saxophonist, arranger and producer. She completed her undergraduate study at Universidade Estadual de Londrina in 1998. In 2000, she received a scholarship from the Japanese Government (Monbusho) and is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Joetsu University of Education, Japan; her dissertation is about Toru Takemitsu's music. In Japan, she has had the chance to take lessons with professional gagaku players and participate in public performances of gagaku and koto. She presented the paper "Olivier Messiaen's Sept Haikai: beyond japonisme" in the International Congress of the Musicological Society of Japan in Shizuoka, last year.

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