One of the most prolific composers of the second half of the 20th century, Tōru Takemitsu was the first Japanese composer fully recognized in the West. His impressive list of works includes over 180 concert pieces, 93 film scores, and several works for theater and dance. His early influences were Debussy, Webern, and Messiaen, but his later music reflects a preoccupation with tone color and an understated, crystalline sound. Precision is ever at the forefront, and silence is fully organized.

In the early 1980s, Takemitsu became increasingly absorbed with tonality – not the functional dominant-to-tonic sort of harmony that defines so much of Western music, but one more aqueous, as evidenced in Toward the Sea. Commissioned by the Greenpeace organization for their Save the Whales campaign, he once described it as “an homage to the sea which creates all things and a sketch for the sea of tonality.” Built on a three-note motif – E-flat, E, A – that translates to S-E-A in German parlance, the piece is divided into three sections, each of which references Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby-Dick.

The work exists in several versions. Takemitsu originally scored the piece for alto flute and guitar, later arranging it for alto flute and marimba and alto flute and harp. The composer has created an Impressionistic tone poem that simultaneously invokes a sense of quiet majesty and the great whales of the deep.

-- Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra