Word: tomita
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Notes Japanese Synthesist Isao Tomita, best known for his reworkings of orchestral showpieces like Gustav Hoist's The Planets: "In this computer age, the question of whether you can play traditional instruments must never be the major factor in qualifying yourself as a musician or composer...
Poor Walter Carlos, who produced Switched on Bach, for example, can't be held responsible for the creations of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Tomita, Vangelis, or Mike Oldfield, but his quasiorchestral synthesizer products directly influenced fatuous schools of rock and roll. For a long time, no one seemed to know what else to do with the synthesizer. More recently, Georgio Moroder and Donna Summer realized in "I Feel Love" a sound which no one will ever duplicate for sheer originality or sensuality. Nevertheless, millions of depraved Moog owners, sitting in their velour studios, will continue vainly to plagarize that...
...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...