Toru Takemitsu: Toward the Sea II (for alto flute, harp and string orchestra)

We guitarists are more likely to know of this work as a duo for alto flute and guitar but it has another form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BMv8MkPQ7w

Toru Takemitsu: Stanza II for harp and tape performed by Ursula Holliger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri2vQUi__Fo

While I'm not much of a fan of John Cage myself I recognize he was a positive influence on a composer whose work I do like, Toru Takemitsu.  I find Wagner repellent as a person and his music is generally insufferably bombastic but I can recognize Wagner was a formative and positive influence for other composers. I'll grant that John Cage's prepared piano inspired some music I have enjoyed over the years. Nikita Koshkin's The Prince's Toys wouldn't be what it is without some influence from Cage. I like Koshkin's music better than Cage's music.  As a guitarist I get to have that opinion. :) 

Just like I also get to have the opinion that every note Toru Takemitsu wrote for the classical guitar is a gem.  Someone should have written or published a monograph on Takemitsu's music for guitar by now ... but then somebody should have published a monograph on Innervisions by now, too. 

Toru Takemitsu "Toward the Sea" for alto flute and guitar (video w score)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0gfunpWWV8

This is pretty much the greatest work for alto flute and guitar any composer has ever written as far as I'm concerned.  The balance seems a bit wonky in the audio but you can read along with the score. 

I was introduced to Takemitsu's music by a friend of mine in college who was from Japan and said that he was a national treasure, to be sure, but she thought some of his music was actually pretty weird but she wanted to know what I thought of his work.  I fell in love with this piece.  I later realized I had heard the astonishing "All in Twilight" a few years earlier and, well, I've been a fan of Takemitsu's music for guitar for pretty much my whole adult life.

It's probably easier to hear the influence of Messiaen in this piece than George Russell. ;)

Toru Takemitsu, "All in Twilight", movement 1 performed by Shin-ichi Fukuda

Back in 1997 I got two CDs on an impulse buy that stuck with me.  The first was the Fabio Zanon recording of the solo guitar music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, which was (and is) a great recording.  Perhaps more fateful for me, much as I enjoy Villa-Lobos, was Fukuda's Denon label recording of solo guitar music written by Toru Takemitsu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IYkYUBdfNo

It has turned out after all those years that I made a fateful impulse purchase because among classical guitarists and Takemitsu fans that 1997 Denon recording has turned out to be hard to find.  Fortunately Fukuda revisited Takemitsu's guitar music for the Naxos label!  I've debated whether or not to wade into a set of blog posts about "All in Twilight" over the years because on the one hand I've got recordings and, far more importantly, the score!  On the other hand, Takemitsu's music is hard to explain and I am not a vocational music theorist or musicologist and part of me thinks someone, after all these decades, should've just put together a monograph on his guitar music ... much like I would've thought by now music theorists and musicologists should've just put together a book about Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.

Julian Bream, 1933-2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/entertainment-arts-53777949
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/14/julian-bream-british-classical-guitarist-dies-aged-87
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/arts/music/julian-bream-dead.html
https://slippedisc.com/2020/08/sadness-at-the-death-of-julian-bream/
Bream playing Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal After John Dowland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKh7azSiBn8

Bream playing movement 1 of Toru Takemitsu's All in Twilight, one of my favorite works of any written for the guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVW0McHG2Vo

I know for many a guitarist Segovia was the greatest 20th century guitarist but for me it's pretty much always been Julian Bream, both for his playing music ranging from the Elizabethan era to contemporary music by Britten, Takemitsu and William Walton (or Martin, for that matter) to his role in commissioning works from contemporary composers.  Bream's musical life distills for me what a musician ought to do, cultivating a deep knowledge of the musical past that is equally attentive to the possibilities of the musical present and future.  I'm not sure I even have more I could meaningfully add to that.   Maybe I'll have more thoughts later but at the moment I don't.