Toru Takemitsu Quotes

#1. I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody ... I am old fashioned.

Toru Takemitsu

#2. Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

Toru Takemitsu

#3. Composition gives proper meaning to the natural streams of sound that penetrate the world.

Toru Takemitsu

#4. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

Toru Takemitsu

#5. Music is a form of prayer.

Toru Takemitsu

#6. Many contemporary composers have been building walls of sounds following their own clever devices. But then, who lives inside those rooms?

Toru Takemitsu

#7. By admitting a new perception of space and giving it an active sense, is it not possible to discover a new unexpected, unexplored world?

Toru Takemitsu

#8. I always want to write erotic music ... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe ... about life.

Toru Takemitsu

#9. My teachers are Duke Ellington and nature.

Toru Takemitsu

#10. Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.

Toru Takemitsu

#11. I am a gardener of infinite time.

Toru Takemitsu