Tuesday Tones

Getting back to my exploration of Japanese music, here is a film score by one of Japan’s most noted and prolific composers, Toru Takemitsu. In his sixty-five years, Takemitsu produced hundreds of musical works, as well as nearly a hundred filmscores and he somehow also found time to write extensively about music. He was one of those creative people who seems to do nothing but spout creative work.

I’ve always found his music to be somewhat cool and distant, but also captivating in an almost hypnotic way. This particular score, for a 1977 film called Ballad of Orin, is a very good example of this. Minimalistic motifs recur throughout, with scoring that is intimate and itself minimalistic. I know absolutely nothing about the film itself, and I also don’t know if this video presents all of the music Takemitsu wrote for the film. Nevertheless, I found this a compelling listen, albeit–as mentioned–cool and distant. This is music for a day of cool rain, I think.

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