The killing fields of 2016 claims another much loved artist… Isao Tomita, the Japanese composer died on May 5th and this morning I’ve been listening to Tomita’s 1974 album
Snowflakes Are Dancing. I can’t profess to being a huge fan, Tomita’s music sounded a little too close to muzak for my tastes (it would have sounded very appropriate coming from the PA of the futuristic subterranean city in
THX-1138) but nevertheless I’m very fond of the Debussy album. For a taster, check out the beautiful rendition of
Clair de Lune. My copy of
Snowflakes Are Dancing is an original RCA Red Seal pressing, not in the least rare or valuable but I prize it for David Hecht’s stunning artwork reworking Marcel Baschet's famous Debussy portrait for the 20th century, and the great shot of Tomita at his moog on the flipside. It’s maddening that subsequent CD issues have tampered with the artwork either by obscuring it within an
ugly frame or reducing it to small quadrant to make room for a silly
High Fidelity blurb.
I mentioned
THX-1138 a moment ago and Tomita connects with another favoutrite film of mine,
Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola approached Tomita to synthesize his father Carmine’s score, but according to Tomita, speaking at his
Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2014, RCA would not let him record for Warners who put out the soundtrack album. Interestingly, on the
Workprint version of the film, during a montage of helicopter shots that precedes the air strike on the village, the temp music sounds very much like a Tomita piece. Still, what’s heard in
Apocalypse Now is a very close approximation of the Tomita sound - the cue heard as Willard reads Kurtz's letter (just before the sampan massacre) sounds remarkably like Tomita's version of
Mars, The Bringer of War. I like to think that some of his DNA is in the film...
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