Music of Tree

Music of Tree belongs to what many scholars have considered Takemitsu's second, “modernist” stylistic period. It is one of Takemitsu’s earliest orchestral pieces, clearly influenced by Anton Webern in its brief, distilled gestures and moments of repose. Unusually for Takemitsu, the piece even contains a moment of true serial writing, with a 12-tone row composed out into a retrograde canon at measure 29; fittingly, the row is constructed of two overlapping octatonic subsets, allowing the composer to nod towards Webernian technique while incorporating a scalar collection that was to become characteristic of his sound.