A live concert CD version was released in 1999 followed by a studio version in 2000.He received four Grammy Award nominations for his 1974 album based on music by Claude Debussy, Snowflakes Are Dancing.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 the same year he scored the original Japanese version of Gullivers Travels Beyond the Moon, but the film was re-scored by Milton DeLugg when it was dubbed into English. He acquired a Moog III synthesizer and began building his home studio. He eventually realized that synthesizers could be used to create entirely new sounds in addition to mimicking other instruments. His first electronic album was Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock, released in Japan in 1972 and in the United States in 1974. The albums contents included ambience, realistic string simulations, an early attempt to synthesize the sound of a symphony orchestra, whistles, and abstract bell-like sounds, as well as a number of processing effects including reverberation, phase shifting, flanging, and ring modulation. Quadrophonic versions of the album provided a spatial audio effect using four speakers. A particularly significant achievement was its polyphonic sound, created prior to the era of polyphonic synthesizers. Tomita created the albums polyphony as Carlos had done before him, with the use of multitrack recording, recording each voice of a piece one at a time, on a separate tape track, and then mixing the result to stereo or quad. Tomitas modular human whistle sounds would also be copied in the presets of later electronic instruments. His version of Arabesque No. Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer (originally titled Star Hustler ) seen on most PBS stations in the United States; in Japan, parts of his version of Rverie were used for the opening and closing of Fuji Television s transmissions; in Spain, Arabesque No. TV program Planeta Imaginario (imaginary planet). Holst: The Planets introduced a science fiction space theme. This album sparked controversy on its release, as Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav Holst, refused permission for her fathers work to be interpreted in this way. 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 television production companies without Tomitas artistic approval. For example, the title piece is his version of Pachelbels Canon in D Major. He credits himself with The Plasma Symphony Orchestra, which was a computer synthesizer process using the wave forms of electromagnetic emanations from various stars and constellations for the sonic textures of this album. He gave a big concert in 1984 at the annual contemporary music Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria called Mind of the Universe, mixing tracks live in a glass pyramid suspended over an audience of 80,000 people. He performed another concert in New York two years later to celebrate the Statue of Liberty centennial ( Back to the Earth ) as well as one in Sydney in 1988 for Australias bicentennial. The Australian performance was part of a A7 million gift from Japan to New South Wales, which included the largest fireworks display up to that time: six fixed sound and lighting systems one of those on a moored barge in the centre of a bay, the other flown in by Chinook helicopter for the relevant parts of the show. A fleet of barges with Japanese cultural performances, including kabuki fire drumming, passed by at various times. His last Sound Cloud event was in Nagoya, Japan in 1997, featuring guest performances by The Manhattan Transfer, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, and Rick Wakeman.
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