冨田勲 طوميــطـا

Isao Tomita is one of the most remarkable Japanese composers and recording artists.

His music has provided me, an amateur musician, with a certain sense of vindication in terms of an approach to
music that tends to transcend traditional forms, in terms of their accoustics, harmonies and thematics.

[ It may seem that the same can be said of so-called "world" music - and as it happens Tomita has featured on recordings that are labeled "world" music or ethnic (as with Nasco Fantasy recording with the Japanese taiko drumming group Kodo) - but we're not talking about world music here ]

But Tomita's work is classical music music that departs from the traditional sounds of accoustic instruments into the vast world of synthetic sounds. Sounds that are engineered with the same ingenuity used in his music composition.

Thematically Tomita is a classical composer, most of the time, but essentially his are modern compositions that can span with ease the spectra of classical, experimental, and electronic music as also ,i daresay, even jazz.

His music has, to me, an inescapable familiarity that is felt with only the best composers like Beethoven, Debussy, McCartney, Wonder, Coltrane or Zappa. But that is also because Tomita's music includes a lot of interpretations of classical works.

Tomita recorded / interpreted / covered Debussy works (whichever your musical persuasion is) in his first album issued in 1974, Snowflakes are dancing, such as Suite Bergamasque no. 3 , better known as Clair de Lune, of which i think there 's a free excerpt at the artist's page for the album.

True to his title as a President of the Japan Synthesizer Programmers Association, the master composer provides a tally of the equipment used on his albums at his web site (at least the dot org site) together with images and samples liner notes and other information.

He has made modern classical compositions, and has been a renouned classical composer and motion picture composer through the 1950s and 1960s. as well as others more akin to the socres of Scott Bradley and Raymond Scott during the 1950s.

This familiarity in the music along with the pensive musical landscapes fashioned by both the composition and the sounds used, gives Tomita's works haunting qualities.

Perhaps those electronically induced soundscapes may not be everyone's liking now or ever, but it is certain that they are timbral territories that have only been explored for the past six decades, less than a hundred years.

In terms of centuries, the mozarts, Bachs, Davis and Coreas of these new soundscapes, may have not yet appeared. but of those, Tomita certainly gives us a more than a few hints.

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Music worth checking out includes
Footprints in the snow and Passepied from the album Snowflakes are dancing; The Planets (1976), in which he reinterprets Holst's 1917 Planets Suite,







Also recommended are Cum Mortuis In Lingua Mortua from Mussorgsky: Pictures at an exhibtion (1975), which also features the unmissable Promenade: Ballet of the chicks in their shells; Peggasus from Dawn chorus (2004).