Toru Takemitsu – Kwaidan (1965)

Composer: Toru Takemitsu

Tracklist

1. Ki 06:00
2. Yuki 06:53
3. Biwa-Uta 11:06
4. Bunraku 03:14

"Kwaidan" (怪談, Kaidan, literally "ghost stories") is a 1965 Japanese anthology horror film

and the first color film of Masaki Kobayashi, known for "The Human Condition", "Harakiri" and "Samurai Rebellion".
It is based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales,
mainly "Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things", for which it is named.
The film consists of four separate and unrelated stories.
It won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival

and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996)

was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory.

Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre.
He is famed for combining elements of oriental and occidental philosophy to create a sound uniquely his own

and for fusing opposites together such as sound with silence and tradition with innovation.
He composed several hundred independent works of music, scored more than ninety films and published twenty books.
He was also a founding member of the Jikken Kobo (experimental workshop) in Japan,

a group of avant-garde artists who distanced themselves from academia

and whose collaborative work is often regarded among the most influential of the 20th century.
His 1957 Requiem for string orchestra attracted international attention, led to several commissions from across the world and established his reputation as one of the leading 20th-century Japanese composers.
He was the recipient of numerous awards and honours and the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award is named after him.
In under 40 years Takemitsu composed music for over 100 films, some of which were written for purely financial reasons.
However, as the composer attained financial independence, he grew more selective,

often reading whole scripts before agreeing to compose the music, and later surveying the action on set,

"breathing the atmosphere" whilst conceiving his musical ideas.
One notable consideration in Takemitsu's composition for film was his careful use of silence

(also important in many of his concert works), which often immediately intensifies the events on screen

and prevents any monotony through a continuous musical accompaniment.

Some of the films that he score are "Harakiri" (1962), "Woman In The Dunes" (1964), "The Face Of Another" (1966),

"Samurai Rebellion" (1967), "Ran" (1985) and the documentary "Antonio Gaudí" (1984).

Memory