November Steps - Legacy

Legacy

The process of writing November Steps, and its success, resulted in a new direction for Takemitsu's music. Takemitsu wrote that the effort in writing the piece, "somehow liberated music from a certain stagnation and brought to music something distinctly new and different". One of the ways in which the work changed Takemitsu's music was in a less traditional approach to musical form, which was replaced with a "stream of sound". Green (1967), composed for orchestra at the same time as November Steps, is more conventional, shows the influence of the two Debussy scores in a more direct way than does November Steps. In contrast, November Steps does not adhere to traditional western concepts of musical form, but takes the view that each sound is the focus of attention.