Biography
Tōru Takemitsu (also credited as T. Takemitsu and Tôru Takemitsu) was a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music and film scores. Largely self-taught, he was a founding member of the Jikken Kōbō experimental workshop in the early 1950s. His 1957 Requiem for string orchestra brought international attention after praise from Igor Stravinsky.
Takemitsu scored more than ninety films. He composed the music for Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), as well as Woman in the Dunes (1964), Kwaidan (1965), Samurai Rebellion (1967) and Black Rain (1989). He received the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Ran and multiple Japanese Academy Awards for film music. He also wrote several hundred concert works and twenty books before his death in 1996.
