Isao Tomita

Isao Tomita (冨田 勲, Tomita Isao, 22 April 1932 – 5 May 2016),

Tomita was born in Tokyo and spent his early childhood with his father in China. After returning to Japan, he took private lessons in orchestration and composition while 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 Melbourne, Australia.

In 1965, Tomita wrote music for

In 1966, he wrote a tone poem based on the Kimba the White Lion, and an original video animation synchronized to this tone poem was released in 1991. With Kunio Miyauchi, he created the music for the tokusatsu science fiction/espionage/action television series Mighty Jack, which aired in 1968. The same year, he co-founded Group TAC.^[10]

1969-1979: Electronic music

In the late 1960s, Tomita turned to electronic music with the impetus of

Tomita then started arranging Claude Debussy's impressionist pieces for synthesizer and, in 1974, released the album Snowflakes Are Dancing; it became a worldwide success and was responsible for popularizing several aspects of synthesizer programming. It was the top-selling classical music album for that year. The album's contents included ambience, realistic string simulations, an early attempt to synthesize the sound of a symphony orchestra, whistles, and abstract bell-like sounds, as well as a number of processing effects including reverberation, phase shifting, flanging, and ring modulation. Quadraphonic versions of the album provided a spatial audio effect using four speakers.^[3] A particularly significant achievement was its polyphonic sound, created prior to the era of polyphonic synthesizers. Tomita created the album's polyphony as Carlos had done before him, with the use of multitrack recording, recording each voice of a piece one at a time, on a separate tape track, and then mixing the result to stereo or quad. It took 14 months to produce the album.^[11]

In his early albums, Tomita also made effective use of analog

Following the success of Snowflakes Are Dancing (1974), Tomita released a number of "classically" themed albums, including arrangements of: Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird (1976), Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1976), and Gustav Holst's The Planets (1976). Holst: The Planets introduced a science fiction "space theme".^[5] This album sparked controversy on its release, as Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav Holst, refused permission for her father's work to be interpreted in this way.^[14]

1978's Kosmos featured his renditions of Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231, Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question and the Star Wars theme.^[15]

While working on his classical synthesizer albums, Tomita also composed numerous scores for Japanese television and films, including the Zatoichi television series, two Zatoichi feature films, the Oshi Samurai (Mute Samurai) television series and the Toho science fiction disaster film, Catastrophe 1999, The Prophesies of Nostradamus (U.S. title: Last Days of Planet Earth) in 1974. The latter blends synthesizer performances with pop-rock and orchestral instruments. It and a few other partial and complete scores of the period have been released on LP and later CD over the years in Japan. While not bootlegs, at least some of these releases were issued by film and television production companies without Tomita's artistic approval.

1980-2000: SoundCloud concerts

In 1984, Tomita released Canon of the Three Stars, which featured classical pieces renamed for astronomical objects. For example, the title piece is his version of Pachelbel's Canon in D Major. He credits himself with "The Plasma Symphony Orchestra", which was a computer synthesizer process using the wave forms of electromagnetic emanations from various stars and constellations for the sonic textures of this album.

Tomita performed a number of outdoor "SoundCloud" concerts, with speakers surrounding the audience in a "cloud of sound". He gave a big concert in 1984 at the annual contemporary music

In the late 1990s, he composed a symphonic fantasy for orchestra and synthesizer titled The Tale of Genji, inspired by the eponymous 11th-century Japanese story. It was performed by symphony orchestras in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London. A live concert CD version was released in 1999 followed by a studio version in 2000.

2001–2016: Later years

In 2001, Tomita collaborated with The Walt Disney Company to compose the background atmosphere music for the AquaSphere entrance at the Tokyo DisneySea theme park outside Tokyo. Tomita followed this with a synthesizer score featuring acoustic soloists for the 2002 film The Twilight Samurai (たそがれ清兵衛, Tasogare Seibei), which won the 2003 Japanese Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music.

The advent of the DVD-Audio format allowed Tomita to further pursue his interests in multichannel audio with reworked releases of The Tale of Genji Symphonic Fantasy and The Tomita Planets 2003. He also performed a version of Claude Debussy's "Clair de lune" for the soundtrack of Ocean's 13 in 2007.

In 2012 Tomita performed "Symphony Ihatov" in Tokyo, directing the Japan Philharmonic, an accompanying choir, and featuring cyber-celebrity/diva, Hatsune Miku, a digital avatar created by the Japanese company Crypton Future Media.^[18]

In 2015, a number of tracks from Snowflakes are Dancing were featured on the soundtrack to