Biography
Teiji Ito, recognized as a modern composer, came into the world in Tokyo during 1935 within a theater family of longstanding prominence. The household relocated to the United States once he reached the age of six, at which point the boy made his first public appearance by supplying drum accompaniment to his mother’s Korean and Japanese dance presentation at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. After leaving home at fifteen, he encountered the American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, and from 1952 onward he supplied scores for her films. Because performers able to navigate an array of world instruments while realizing his distinctive notations proved scarce, Ito handled the majority of recordings himself. Travel to Haiti alongside Deren by 1955 placed him under the tutelage of master drummer Coyote. Following their marriage, he sustained his compositional contributions to her projects, among them a 1959 score for the 1943 silent film Meshes of the Afternoon. The association continued until Deren’s death in 1961, the year Ito also recorded King Ubu for a New York staging of Alfred Jarry’s pre-dadaist masterpiece and completed her final unfinished work, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. In 1963 he furnished music for the Boultenhouse film Dionysus. His piece Shaman served as the soundtrack for animator Harry Smith’s hand-painted Early Abstractions. The Japanese Garden, his volume on the fundamental components of Japanese gardens and the relations among those components, appeared in 1972. Cherel Ito, his third wife, later acted as executor of the Deren collection. Ito died in 1982 during a visit to Haiti. His recording of King Ubu did not reappear until the Tzadik label issued it in 1998, with authorization from the composer’s estate.
Albums
