本文以日本作曲家武滿徹的管絃樂作品《弧》（アークArc, 1963）以及《群鳥降入星形之庭》（鳥は星形の庭に降りるA Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, 1977）為例，闡述音樂創作過程中的草稿或草圖（sketch）因素與含意。本文探討作曲家武滿徹如何運用與「庭園」相關的視覺圖示，藉由日本庭園的想法來強調樂曲的非線性結構；本文並指出此種非線性的時間感，事實上不僅出自日本特殊的美學概念，同時還有其他作曲構思基礎的來源，包括武滿對於「夢」的想法以及他在電影配樂的實踐，更媒介了二戰後的種種歷史因素與技術改變。

Compositional sketch in music, in its common understanding, is the preliminary representation of music in notation that for a long time has been by default schematic. That means, the common notated signs of music denote not literal representations of musical sounds, but relational signs of different parameters in the musical system, e.g. pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. This paper, instead, examines composer’s sketches produced before writing down the notes; they are neither instructions for performance nor blueprints for composition. This type of sketch outlines on the one hand the compositional strategies employed in music, on the other hand they reveal the musical contents of the composition in an indirect but no less essential manner. In particular, this paper focuses on the graphic sketches of the Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu, and sees how he uses graphic sketches to enhance his musical ideas, and at the same times displaying his aesthetic agenda. This paper demonstrates how these sketches display semantic meaning beyond their structural role and how they become a filter of information in relation to the musical notation. By analyzing the relationships between graphic sketch, notation, musical sound, and listening experience in Takemitsu’s orchestral piece A Flock Descends into a Pentagonal Garden and Arc for Piano and Orchestra, this paper argues that the composer not only shows its formal design in the graphic representation, the sketches also pose a demand for listeners that cannot achieve through more traditional ways of notations. In addition, this paper argues that the sketched garden as a way of filtering the streaming data is much more modern than how it was assigned in Takemitsu’s line of thought in compositional theory; it is also related to his experience in composing for films, in despite of its apparent dress-ups as “traditional Japanese aesthetics.”