Isao Tomita
Isao Tomita (冨田 勲; Tomita Isao, April 22, 1932 - ), is one of the most renowned electronic music composers in the world.
Tomita was born in Tokyo and spent early childhood with his father in China. After returning to Japan, he took private lessons in orchestration and composition while being an art history student at Keio University, Tokyo. He graduated in 1955 and became a full-time composer for television, film and theatre. He composed the theme music for the Japanese Olympic gymnastics team for the 1956 Summer Olympics in Australia.
In the late 1960s, he turned his attention to electronic music after hearing albums by Wendy Carlos in which Wendy performed classical music with the Moog synthesizer. Isao acquired a Moog III synthesiser and began building his home studio. He started arranging Claude Debussy's pieces for synthesizer and in 1974 the album "Snowflakes are dancing" was released and it became a worldwide success. In that year, he also composed music for the Japanese film Last Days of Planet Earth. He often makes use of Klangfarbenmelodie, with synthesizer voices.
He kept on releasing albums, of which the best known are his interesting arrangements of classics, such as Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Gustav Holst's The Planets.
Tomita has performed a number of outdoor "Sound Cloud" concerts, with speakers surrounding the audience in a "cloud of sound". He gave a big concert in 1984 at the annual contemporary music Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria called "Mind of the Universe", playing instruments in a glass pyramid suspended over an audience of 80,000 people. He performed a similar concert in New York two years later to celebrate the Statue of Liberty centennial ("Back to the Earth").
Tomita's latest studio album was an orchestral rendering of the old Japanese story "The Tale of Genji", released in 1999.
Discography
- Snowflakes are Dancing (1974)
- Pictures at an Exhibition (1975)
- Firebird Suite (1975)
- The Planets (1976)
- Sound Creature (1977)
- Kosmos (1978)
- Bermuda Triangle (1978)
- Greatest Hits (1979)
- Daphnis et Chloé - Bolero (1979)
- Greatest Hits Volume 2 (1981)
- Grand Canyon (1982)
- Dawn Chorus - Canon of the Three Stars (1984)
- Best of Tomita (1984)
- Space Walk (1984)
- Mind of the Universe - Live at Linz (1985)
- Back to the Earth - Live in New York (1988)
- Misty Kid of Wind (1989)
- Storm from the East (1992)
- School (1993)
- First Emperor (1994)
- Shin Nihon Kikou (1994)
- Nasca Fantasy (1994)
- Bach Fantasy (1996)
- Tale of Genji (1999)