Quotes from Toru Takemitsu

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

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

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.

Music is a form of prayer.

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.

My teachers are Duke Ellington and nature.

I am a gardener of infinite time.

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

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

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

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.

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

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