Snowflakes Are Dancing

 By ISAO TOMITA

 
Tomita  
      Seventy-five years after Claude Debussy's compositions, Japanese musician Isao Tomita collected a small mountain of electronic equipment and reinterpreted Debussy with startling success on Snowflakes Are Dancing. A historic release, in that it pretty much fulfilled the early promise of synthesizers as a valuable addition to the musician's palette. It was enough to convince me Debussy probably would have utilized electronic instruments were he alive today.
      It's amazing to consider the daunting task Tomita assumed with this project. Debussy had for years been considered the intellectual property of classical musicians. Folk music went electric with Dylan, and the blues went electric in Chicago, but the classical crowd was never open to electrification of their rich acoustic sound. Tomita was brash enough to take such an approach. What a ordeal this would be for a lesser talent; to not only create an entirely new vocabulary of musical sounds and organizational ideas, but to work from a new instrumentation. Imagine an artist who not only invents a new kind of painting but insists on creating entirely new pigments and brushes. Tomita did not chain himself to the instrumentation in common use when Debussy was alive, and so he renewed the spirit of creative innovation and experiment Debussy embodied.

"Reverie" (44-sec sample)


Here's a link to a possible purchase site for Snowflakes Are Dancing.



Copyright © 1998 by Keith Purtell. All rights reserved.