MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Toshiro Mayuzumi died in Kawasaki, Japan, ten years ago today, on April 10, 1997, at the age of 68.

One of the most important figures in post-war Japanese music, Mayuzumi was both an adventurous concert composer and an exceptionally prolific contributor to cinema, writing more than 100 film scores. His work ranged from Japanese art-house classics to major international productions, and in 1967 he became the first Japanese-born composer nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Mayuzumi was born in Yokohama on February 20, 1929. He studied composition with Kunihiko Hashimoto, Tomojiro Ikenouchi and Akira Ifukube at the Tokyo Music School and Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, graduating in 1951 before continuing his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. Exposure to Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and musique concrète profoundly affected him, and on returning to Japan he became one of the country’s pioneers of electronic and avant-garde music.

Cinema accompanied him almost from the beginning. His score for Hideo Oba’s Homecoming (1950) won a Mainichi music prize even before he completed his studies, and during the following decade he became one of Japan’s busiest screen composers. His credits included Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Woman in the Rumor (1954) and Street of Shame (1956), Kon Ichikawa’s Enjo (1958), Yasujirō Ozu’s Good Morning (1959), and Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960).

Street of Shame, Mizoguchi’s final film, demonstrated Mayuzumi’s modernist instincts particularly vividly. Its electronic sounds and abrasive textures gave the drama an unusually contemporary atmosphere, far removed from conventional orchestral scoring and perfectly suited to its unsentimental portrait of life in a Tokyo brothel.

Mayuzumi was equally effective in the more confrontational Japanese cinema of the 1960s. He scored Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Warped Ones (1960) and Black Sun (1964), and developed an important association with Shohei Imamura through The Pornographers (1966) and Profound Desires of the Gods (1968). His film music could incorporate jazz, percussion, traditional Japanese sonorities and electronic experimentation with the same freedom found in his concert works.

His greatest international assignment came when John Huston hired him for the biblical epic The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966). Mayuzumi responded with a large-scale score combining massive choral and orchestral forces with more austere, modernist passages. Huston reportedly described him as a “modern Beethoven,” and the score received both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.

Huston subsequently brought him to Hollywood again for Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. These remained Mayuzumi’s principal American films, although his Japanese career continued with projects including Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods and later Jo no Mai (1984).

Away from cinema, Mayuzumi was a major concert composer whose works included the Nirvana Symphony, Mandala Symphony, Bugaku and the opera Kinkakuji. He experimented extensively with electronic music and musique concrète while also drawing increasingly on Buddhist ritual, gagaku and other Asian traditions, creating a highly individual synthesis of Western modernism and Japanese musical culture.