Listen To New Music Inspired By Karate's Olympic Debut

https://www.npr.org/sections/tokyo-olympics-live-updates/2021/08/05/ [login to see] /karate-olympics-tokyo-music-kata-gene-coleman
Composer Gene Coleman, a Guggenheim-winning luminary in the worlds of experimental film and avant-garde music, is more the type to show up for a residency at a prestigious music festival rather than at the Olympics.

"I'm not a big sports person," he confesses. But Coleman grew up in a small Wisconsin village where he was transfixed by the Bruce Lee movies he saw on TV, and taught himself karate out of books as a kid. After the International Olympic Committee voted in 2016 to bring karate to the Toyko Games, Coleman was invited by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission to compose a soundscape of music to celebrate the decision.

Coleman's creation is called KATA, after the elegantly choreographed patterns of movements practiced by martial artists. "If you're a beginning karate student, you learn kata," Coleman explains. "And those kata contain all the movements that that particular style of karate is composed of." It's like music, and also like code.