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Akira Ifukube

 
Music Encyclopedia: Akira Ifukube
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(b Kushiro, 7 March 1914). Japanese composer. He was briefly a pupil of Tcherepnin. His music, mostly orchestral and including several ballets, uses Ainu and other folk traditions and is rhythmically violent (his style has been described as ‘ethnic exoticism’). He published a treatise on orchestration (1953).


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Artist: Akira Ifukube
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Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Classical Artists
Akira Ifukube
  • Period: Modern (1910-1949)
  • Country: Japan
  • Born: May 31, 1914 in Kushiro, Japan
  • Died: February 08, 2006 in Tokyo, Japan

Biography

One of the most respected of serious composers in Japan since the 1950s, Akira Ifukube has also led something of a double life as one of the most popular and prolific film composers in Japan since the late '40s. He was born in Kushiro on the island of Hokkaido in 1914, which was one of the homes of the aboriginal Ainu. As a boy, Ifukube listened to their music, which greatly influenced his own musical creativity. Ifukube was a self-taught violinist and earned prizes for his early compositional efforts. He majored in music and forestry, and the latter provided him with his living until just after World War II, when he began teaching music as a professor at Tokyo Art University and started writing film scores, principally at Toho Studios. His movie scores quickly distinguished themselves for their inventiveness and richness, incorporating Eastern and Western elements.

In 1954, Ifukube was assigned to score the Toho film Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda, which provided him with a unique canvas on which to work. A science fiction film shot in a neo-realist style and inspired by a tragic incident involving Japanese fishermen whose boat was contaminated by fallout from an American H-bomb test, Gojira became a vehicle for some of the most expressive orchestral music of Ifukube's career. His also became the Japanese film music most widely heard in the West, when the movie was recut, partly dubbed, and released in America as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Everything about the score -- the ethnic music associated with the Odo islanders, the grim march associated with the defense of Tokyo, the martial fanfare depicting the dispatch of the research ship, the ominous theme associated with Godzilla's attack on Tokyo, and the funereal chorale led by the bass strings, associated with the sacrifice of Dr. Serizawa -- was memorable.

Ifukube went on to write more than 250 film scores in a career lasting 50 years, including some of the most respected movies ever made in Japan, among them Harp Of Burma (aka The Burmese Harp), for which he would appropriate the funereal music from his Gojira score and expand on its thematic material. But it was his Godzilla music, not just for the initial feature but for the best of the numerous sequels and offshoot films that followed, that would make Ifukube a popular culture icon. He would write many additions to and variations on his work in the original movie, and achieved a unique pop-classicalcareer summit in the mid-'80s with Godzilla's Symphonic Fantasia, a feature-length video montage drawn from all of Toho Films' horror/science fiction releases over the preceding 31 years, broken down into thematic sections totalling nearly two hours and scored to Ifukube's newly reorchestrated and recomposed themes from those movies, transformed into a four-movement symphonic work. He retired in the 1990s, but returned to Toho one last time to write the music for what was then proposed to be the studio's final Godzilla/Gojira movie, Godzilla vs. Destroyer, for which he reprised his 1954 work once more in a film with a direct link to the original movie. Ifukube remains a uniquely revered figure in Japanese music, among the nation's most respected and widely recorded (and performed) composers for the concert hall, and also the country's most well-known and widely recorded (and re-recorded) film composer. The only comparable figures in depth, breadth, and recognition in western music would be Miklós Rózsa, Aaron Copland, or Bernard Herrmann, each of whom to some extent straddled the classical and film worlds on a somewhat limited basis, and John Williams, who achieved stardom (even super-stardom of a kind) as a film composer, although Ifukube's success in Japan rather transcends all of their successes. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
Cinematographer: Akira Ifukube
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Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: 1914 in Hokkaido, Japan
  • Died: Feb 08, 2006 in Tokyo, Japan
  • Occupation: Cinematographer
  • Active: '50s-'70s
  • Major Genres: Science Fiction, Drama
  • Career Highlights: The Burmese Harp, Children of Hiroshima, The Makioka Sisters
  • First Major Screen Credit: The Quiet Duel (1949)

Biography

Perhaps best known in the West for scoring Gojira (1954), Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964), and Terror of Mechagodzilla (1978), Akira Ifukube is one of the most-respected and most-beloved classical composers in Japan. Born in a small village in the northern island of Hokkaido in 1914, Ifukube was exposed to Ainu culture -- Japan's equivalent to Native Americans -- at a young age. By his own admission, the improvisational style and traditional motifs of Ainu music greatly influenced Ifukube. He even included an Ainu chant for his score of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. While studying at Hokkaido University in the late 1920s, he started a music group with Fumio Hayasaka, who would go on to write scores for some of Akira Kurosawa's masterworks, and soon Ifukube was winning international awards for his scores. While teaching at the Tokyo Ongaku Gakko, whose students included Toshiro Mayuzumi, he wrote his first score in 1947. Outside of composing for the Godzilla series, Ifukube also wrote some 200 scores for such films as Burmese Harp, Chushingura (1963), and the beloved Zatoichi series. In 1976, he became the president of Tokyo Music University and he has since won numerous prizes for his scores and classical compositions. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Akira Ifukube
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Akira Ifukube (伊福部昭 Ifukube Akira?) (31 May 1914 – 8 February 2006) was a Japanese composer of classical music and film scores, perhaps best known for his work on the soundtracks of the Godzilla movies by Toho.

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Biography

Akira Ifukube was born on May 31, 1914 in Kushiro on the Japanese island of Hokkaidō, the third son of a Shinto priest. Much of his childhood was spent in areas with a mixed Japanese and Ainu population, and his father, unusually for the time, socialised with Ainu. Ifukube was strongly influenced by the traditional music of both peoples, and studied the violin and the shamisen. His first encounter with classical music occurred when attending secondary school in Hokkaidō's capital, Sapporo. Legend has it that Ifukube decided to become a composer at the age of 14 after hearing a radio performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring. He also cited the music of Manuel de Falla as a major influence.

Ifukube went on to study forestry at Hokkaido University and composing in his spare time, which prefigured a line of self-taught Japanese composers such as Tōru Takemitsu and Takashi Yoshimatsu. His first piece was the piano solo, Piano Suite (later the title was changed to Japan Suite, arranged for orchestra). This piece was dedicated to the pianist John Copland who was living in Spain. Atsushi Miura, musicologist and Ifukube's friend in university, sent a fan letter to Copland. Copland replied "It is wonderful that you listen my disc in spite of you living in Japan, the opposite side of the earth. I imagine you may compose music. Send me some piano pieces." Then Miura, who was not a composer, presented Ifukube and this piece to Copland. Copland promised to interprete it, but the correspondence was unfortunately stopped because of the Spain War. Ifukube's big break came in 1935, when his first orchestral piece, Japanese Rhapsody, won the first prize in an international contest for young composers promoted by Alexander Tcherepnin. The judges of that contest—Albert Roussel, Jacques Ibert, Arthur Honegger, Alexandre Tansman, Tibor Harsányi, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, and Henri Gil-Marchex—were unanimous in their selection of Ifukube as the winner[1]. The next year, Ifukube studied modern Western composition while Tcherepnin was visiting Japan, and in 1938 his Piano Suite obtained an honourable mention at the I.C.S.M. festival in Venice. In the late 1930s his music, especially Japanese Rhapsody, was performed in Europe on a number of occasions.

On completing University, he worked as a forestry officer and lumber processor, and towards the end of the Second World War was appointed by the Japanese Imperial Army to study the elasticity and vibratory strength of wood. He suffered radiation exposure after carrying out x-rays without protection, a consequence of the wartime lead shortage. Thus, he had to abandon forestry work and became a professional composer and teacher. Ifukube spent some time in hospital due to the radiation exposure, and was startled one day to hear one of his own marches being played over the radio when General Douglas MacArthur arrived to formalize the Japanese surrender.

From 1946 to 1953, he taught at the Nihon University College of Art, during which period he composed his first film score for The End of the Silver Mountains, released in 1947. Over the next fifty years, he would compose more than 250 film scores, the high point of which was his 1954 music for Ishirō Honda's Toho movie, Godzilla. Ifukube also created Godzilla's trademark roar – produced by rubbing a resin-covered leather glove along the loosened strings of a double bass – and its footsteps, created by striking an amplifier box.

Despite his financial success as a film composer, Ifukube's first love had always been his general classical work as a composer. In 1974, he returned to teaching at the Tokyo College of Music, becoming president of the college the following year, and in 1987 retired to become president of the College's ethnomusicology department. He trained the younger generation composer such as Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yasushi Akutagawa and Kaoru Wada. He also published Orchestration, a 1,000-page book on theory.

He died in Tokyo at the Meguro-ku Hospital of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome on February 8, 2006 at the age of 91.

Honors

The Japanese government awarded Ifukube the Order of Culture.

Subsequently, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class.[2]

Selected works

Orchestral

  • Japanese Rhapsody (1935)[1][2]
  • Triptyque aborigene for chamber orchestra (1937)
  • Symphony Concertante for piano and orchestra (1941)
  • Ballata sinfonica (1943)[3]
  • Overture to the Nation of Philippines (1944)
  • Salome (1948) – ballet based on Oscar Wilde's play of the same name. Ifukube revised and expanded the score in 1987. The piece is written in a conservative, late-romantic style reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky or even Khachaturian.[citation needed]
  • Drumming of Japan (1951, revised 1984)
  • Symphonic Fantasia No. 1 (1954, revised 1983)
  • Sinfonia Tapkaara (1954, revised 1979)[4]
  • Ritmica Ostinata for piano and orchestra (1961, revised 1972)
  • Ronde in Burlesque for wind orchestra (1972, arranged to orchestra in 1983)
  • Violin Concerto No. 2 (1978)
  • Lauda concertata for marimba and orchestra (1979)
  • Symphonic Fantasia No. 2 (1983)
  • Symphonic Fantasia No. 3 (1983)
  • Gotama the Buddha for mixed chorus and orchestra (1989)
  • Japanese Suite for orchestra (1991)[5]
  • Japanese Suite for string orchestra (1998)

Chamber and instrumental

  • Piano Suite (1933)
  • Toccata for guitar (1970)
  • Fantasia for baroque lute (1980)
  • Sonata for violin and piano (1985)
  • Ballata sinfonica for duo-treble and bass 25-stringed koto (2001)

Vocal

  • Ancient Minstrelsies of Gilyak Tribes (1946)
  • Three Lullabies among the Native Tribes on the Island of Sakhalin (1949)
  • Eclogues after Epos among Aino Races for solo voice and 4 kettle drums (1950)
  • A Shanty of the Shiretoko Peninsula (1960)
  • The Sea of Okhotsk for soprano, bassoon, piano (or harp) and double bass (1988)
  • Lake Kimtaankamuito (Lake Mashū) (摩周湖 Mashū-ko?) for soprano, viola and harp or piano (1992)
  • La Fontaine sacrée for soprano, viola, bassoon and harp (1964, 2000); arrangement by the composer from the 1964 film score Mothra vs. Godzilla

Film scores

In addition, his work was used in Godzilla vs. Biollante, Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, Godzilla 2000, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, and Godzilla: Final Wars.

References

  1. ^ liner notes: Naxos 8.555071 (Morihide Katayarna)
  2. ^ L'Harmattan web site (in French)

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

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Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Artist. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ®, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Cinematographer. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Akira Ifukube".  Read more