Isao Tomita

Renowned composer Isao Tomita was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1932.
While a student at Keio University, he studied composition under Kishio Hirao and Kojiro Kobune.

In the early 1950’s, Tomita began working as a composer and arranger in a range of fields including broadcasting, stage, movies and commercials. In 1974 his album Clair de Lune reached No. 2 on the Billboard Classics chart, and his next album Pictures at an Exhibition reached No. 1. Due to these achievements, the name “Tomita” achieved worldwide recognition. The year after he released this album, he became the first Japanese artist to be nominated for Grammy Awards in four categories, including Album of the Year.

Tomita’s canon of compositions includes many familiar songs that most listeners may recognize. Some of his notable contributions include theme music for TV productions such as NHK’s Hana no Shogai, Ten to Chi to, Shin Heike Monogatari, Katsu Kaishu, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Shin Nihon Kiko, Gendai no Eizo, Kaikyo and more. In the realm of film music he contributed music to A Fugitive from the Past, Prophecies of Nostradamus, Keishicho Monogatari Series and for animated films he scored Osamu Tezuka’s Jungle Emperor Leo, A Thousand and One Nights, Princess Knight, Dororo, Toei Animation’s Arabian Nights: Sinbad the Sailor, Gulliver’s Space Travel, and more.

In the 1960s and 70s, Tomita was one of the pioneers involved in developing 3D sound works. A representative example of his work includes the music for the Toshiba IHI pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. Another milestone came in 1984 when he organized the spectacular and enormously successful Tomita Soundcloud event, which enveloped the audience of some 80,000 people in a figurative universe of sound, utilizing the ground, the surface of the river, and the entire area above the Danube River in Austria to create super-stereophonic sounds. Since then, similar events have been held and resoundingly hailed around the world: The 1986 Statue of Liberty Centennial in New York , 1988 Chubu Mirai Expo in Gifu, Japan, The 1988 Australian Bicentennial in Sydney, Australia, and an event at the 1997 Chunichi Dome in Nagoya, Japan.

In 1998 he composed the original work The Tale of Genji: Symphonic Fantasy, which can be regarded as the culmination of Tomita’s work.
The work was released via performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.

Since initially creating The Tale of Genji: Symphonic Fantasy in 1998, Tomita revisited it many times up until the performance of the final version on April 3rd, 2015. This seminal performance in Izumi Hall in Osaka features narration in the Kyoto dialect and soloists performing on traditional Japanese instruments (This Work).

Tomita passed away on May 5th, 2016. The composer was engrossed in developing new work up until the time of his death.