Over the Rainbow

Awarded the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1981, Over the Rainbow was written by Harold Arlen for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and became the defining song of Judy Garland's career. Tōru Takemitsu, who as a teenager discovered Western music through clandestine listening to American and European songs, chose it for his 1977 Songbook — twelve transcriptions that feel less like arrangements than acts of remembering.