Toru, Toru, Toru

3 Comments

• Mat Viola says:

  December 4, 2010 at 11:47 am

  Nice to see a com­poser get­ting some recog­ni­tion, both here and at the Film Forum. I cher­ish Takemitsu’s avant-garde score for Woman in the Dunes, an out­stand­ing example of the way mod­ern­ist music can be ima­gin­at­ively applied to film scor­ing. Takemitsu’s score illus­trates just how far com­posers were mov­ing away from the Romantic idiom that dom­in­ated film scor­ing through the ’50s.
  Mat

• Stephen Bowie says:

  December 5, 2010 at 1:01 am

  Only prob­lem is, that HYMN TO A TIRED MAN screen­ing was today (Dec. 4), not tomor­row (Dec. 5). Why the FF is only run­ning it once is mys­ter­i­ous. It’s not like the print was in bad shape.
  I thought of the MIDNIGHT COWBOY score too, but was­n’t that kind of folksy-harmonica-applied-to-non-folksy-subject mat­ter score briefly in vogue in the late 60s? Maybe Takemitsu picked up on it in some oth­er American flick, although I can­’t think what it might have been, off-hand. It does sound very west­ern but maybe Takemitsu was actu­ally avant la lettre on that one.

• Michael Adams says:

  December 6, 2010 at 12:33 pm

  Charlotte Zwerkin’s splen­did Takemitsu doc, avail­able on DVD, the Smithsonian Channel occa­sion­ally shows Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden, which he scored and in which he dis­cusses the influ­ence of nature on his music.