Person: Tomita Isao

Tomita Isao, born April 22, 1932, was a renowned Japanese electronic music composer.

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, he composed the theme song and incidental music for Tezuka Osamu's animated TV series Jungle Taitei (Jungle Emperor), released in the USA as Kimba the White Lion. In 1966 he wrote a tone poem based on this music with an original video animation synchronized to the tone poem released in 1991. Tomita Isao and Miyauchi Kunio also created the music for the tokusatsu SF/espionage/action TV series Mighty Jack, which aired in 1968.

In the late 1960s, he turned his attention to electronic music after hearing albums by Walter Carlos in which Walter performed classical music with the Moog synthesizer. Isao acquired a Moog III synthesizer 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; it became a worldwide success. His version of Arabesque No. 1 was later used as the theme to the astronomy TV series Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer (originally titled Star Hustler) seen on most PBS stations.

He continued to release 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.

While working on his classical synthesizer albums, Tomita continued composing 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 (US 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 TV production companies without Tomita's artistic approval.

Tomita and his music are heavily featured in Chris Marker's 1983 film-essay Sans Soleil.

In the late 1990s he composed a hybrid orchestra plus synthesizer symphonic fantasy titled The Tale of Genji inspired by the eponymous old Japanese story. It was performed in concert 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.

In 2001, Tomita collaborated with Walt Disney Company to compose the background atmosphere music for the AquaSphere entrance at the Tokyo DisneySea theme park outside Tokyo.

His synthesizer score featuring acoustic soloists for the 2002 film The Twilight Samurai won the 2003 Japanese Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music.

The advent of the DVD-Audio format has 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.