Word: tomita
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...become the best-selling "classical" record of all time (3 million copies sold worldwide to date). None of the subsequent sons of SOB (The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Moog Strikes Back) has ever managed to overtake the original, but the newest and most interesting challenger is Tokyo's Isao Tomita, 43. After a slow start last year, his RCA album Snowflakes are Dancing (electronic versions of Debussy piano pieces) has passed the 200,000 mark. Three months ago, RCA came out with Tomita's second album of synthesized sound: Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. It has already...
Poor old Mussorgsky: Rimsky-Korsakov doctored Boris Godunov almost beyond recognition, Stokowski mauled A Night on Bald Mountain, and now Tomita has repainted Pictures. It is a marvel that the original music has the strength to stand up to this kind of dilution, like a good Scotch to soda. Tomita's Pictures is no threat to Sviatoslav Richter's classic version of Mussorgsky's piano original, or the Toscanini interpretation of the expert Ravel orchestration. What Tomita does is pop art pure and simple. It is benevolent caricature, a funny-paper treatment of the classics for those...
...hears each of the first four notes of the opening "Promenade" from a different loudspeaker. Disconcerting, that. So, at first, is the fact that the sound is not Mussorgsky's piano or Ravel's trumpet, but one of human voices-or rather, canned choral sounds transmogrified by Tomita's Mellotron, an electronic keyboard device that plays prerecorded tapes. Things perk up considerably with the first picture, "The Gnome," a succession of subterranean squeaks and giggles that resemble a band of tipsy trolls frolicking beneath Frankenstein's castle. As for "The Old Castle," it sounds like...
...scholarly former art-history student. Inside his Tokyo apartment there are TV sets everywhere, James Brown or Elvis billowing from the kitchen radio, and a clock on the wall that appears to be five hours slow. "We like to think of it as being seven hours fast," says Tomita, long resigned to the incongruity of being an electronics master who cannot fix a clock...
...Japan, Tomita has been known mainly as the composer of standard orchestral sound tracks for a historical drama series that is watched every Sunday night by as much as 30% of Japan's TV audience. "The orchestra is perhaps my first love," says Tomita, "but how can one ignore the synthesizer in this day and age?" For one thing, he cannot afford to ignore it. He still owes the bank $150,000 for the six electronic keyboards, four tape recorders and assorted filters, mixers, phasers and generators jammed into his 10 ft.-by-12 ft. studio with which...