In spite of the increasing interest in the music of Toru Takemitsu in the academia in the last fifteen years or so, analytical study of his works Ñ especially that of quantitative nature Ñ has been relatively few in number. Most music scholars have focused on his so-called Japanese-ness and tried to find it in the temporal quality of his music, sensitivity to timbre, or even influence of Zen Buddhism, whereas his pitch language has been discussed, if any, only in relation to Japanese modes. Set-theoretical analysis does exist, but its main focus has been a smaller set such as trichord.

My paper examines larger sets of seven to nine pitch classes to locate the Japanese-ness of Takemitsu's music somewhere else, that is, in the background structure of music. By looking at his selection of pitch classes for each measure or even section, not just a melody or chord, it becomes possible to see the way he circulates his pitch-class collections throughout the piece and to draw its larger picture. This paper takes Dream/Window as an example, since it is an intersection of the two recurrent metaphors in TakemitsuÕs titles: dream and Japanese garden. Among many other extra-musical references Takemitsu favors such as rain and constellation, those two are of particular importance here, since they could actually be a metaphor to the formal structure of music. Some pitch-class collections do recur, although they follow no preexisting scheme or unidirectional path Ñ just as in a dream or a walk in a Japanese garden. The collections cannot be prolonged in the Schenkerian sense, but by way of association their recurrence functions as a landmark and thus establishes a larger-scale framework. This non-linearity of his music would be considered Japanese. Messiaen's influence on Takemitsu's choice of pitch materials is also discussed.

Hideaki Onishi is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he studies with Jonathan Bernard, John Rahn, and Joel Durand.Ê He is currently working on the analysis of later orchestral works of Toru Takemitsu for his dissertation.Ê He is also active as a bass-baritone singer and pianist.