At the turn of the 20th century, when Claude Debussy sat down to write his haunting piano piece “Clair de Lune,” he had before him little more than pen, paper and piano.

Toward the end of the century, when Isao Tomita sat down to record the piece, he had before him a thicket that included a Moog synthesizer, comprising (among many other things) a 914 extended range fixed filter bank, two 904-A voltage-controlled low-pass filters, nine 901-B oscillators, four 911 envelope generators, five 902 voltage-controlled amplifiers, a 950 keyboard controller and a 6401 Bode ring modulator; several tape recorders, among them an Ampex MM-1100 16-track and a Sony TC-9040 4-track; two Sony MX-16 mixers; an AKG BX20E Echo unit; an Eventide Clockworks Instant Phaser; two Binson Echorec 2 units; and the electronic keyboard instrument known as a Mellotron.

Released by RCA in 1974, the resulting recording, “Snowflakes Are Dancing,” brought Mr. Tomita — who died on May 5, at 84, and was widely considered the father of Japanese electronic music — international renown. Nominated for a Grammy Award for best classical album, the record, containing Mr. Tomita’s renditions of a string of Debussy pieces, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, an almost unheard-of feat for a disc at least nominally rooted in the classical world.

It also divided that world, much as the album that inspired it, “Switched-On Bach,” by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, had done on its release in 1968.