Why Miyazaki's Films Sound Pretty

here's a great question that a lot of people might be curious about what makes a Miyazaki film sound pretty and the obvious answer that everyone in the comment section is gonna give us is that Mamoru Fujisawa aka Joe Hisaishi is just a brilliant composer and you don't need to look into it any farther than that and what interests me whenever I have an exchange like this is that very few people take into account their own biases like okay hiss I use music sounds pretty or does hiss I use music sound pretty to you what is it about his music that you think sounds pretty why do you specifically think it sounds pretty see for a lot of people hiss Ayesha's work is going to sound similar to another composer by the name of Claude Debussy Debussy was one of the impressionist composers meaning he was one of the first composers who broke away from the traditions of the Romantic period vogner screw that guy Beethoven overrated Brahms don't make me laugh let's write a bunch of whole tone scales that never resolved the idea behind Impressionism in music was that instead of exploring the harmonic motion and fundamental resolutions of the older romantic style [Music] the Impressionists would focus more on color and Tambor instead of these carefully calculated phrases they might not really establish the key signature at all and would use techniques like extended harmonies parallel motion and modes along with other unfamiliar scales to explore new sounds I'm gonna do my best to just breeze past these music theory terms because I don't want this video to get any longer than it has to be the reason we associate Debussy and the impressionist composers with Impressionism is because Impressionism was all about suspending a moment in time on the canvas they were the original you kind of got a squint at them to get what's going on kind of paintings and personally there's some of my favorite I really like this one but when it comes to music since Debussy and company wouldn't really follow the rules of the last few hundred years they'd explore the areas outside of tonality which meant that their music would use the standard method of tension and release or resolution to drive their melodies and harmonies in other words they didn't follow the rules that had existed for the last few hundred years which at times made it feel like their music wasn't going anywhere or on occasion it would feel like it was almost suspended in time but that lack of intense regulated harmonic motion that you'd see in something like Beethoven kind of makes Debussy x' pieces feel a little more relaxed overall instead of moving in a clear direction sometimes they kind of just gently float in whatever space they're in and for a lot of people that sounds peaceful or ethereal or shimmery or even pretty and if you crack open his eye issues works you see a lot of similar techniques being used he uses pentatonic scales and modes [Music] he uses extended harmonies [Music] some quarrel and quintal harmonies [Music] and even some planing or parallel motion [Music] again I'm not gonna explain a lot of these terms I'm just trying to prove a parallel between these composers so it looks like history was a huge fan of Debussy and used a lot of W C's works as inspiration right except that these two don't really line up super well at times like yeah his syeec will use pentatonic melodies but every once in a while he'll just start including notes outside of the pentatonic scale for seemingly no reason or the pentatonic scale that he uses won't really fit into what a pentatonic scale actually is and yeah he say she will use Cortland quintal harmonies but he'll also throw in some of those upper extensions at the same time for seemingly no reason which I don't think was Debussy speed what I'm saying is is that some of these techniques don't line up super cleanly and I couldn't quite figure out why and on top of all of that you can also draw some parallels between hissing she's work and modal jazz from the 1960s jazz coming from blues will always have the same pentatonic element to it this tune in particular uses Cortland quintal harmonies along with some stagnated harmonic motion which you can also see in some of history's work instance modal jazz emerged after Bebop you can bet you're gonna see a lot of harmonic extensions and I mean it's called modal jazz and they can find a few places where history she used a motor tube so maybe he say she liked both Debussy and modal jazz sure but that still doesn't explain how and why he breaks the rules where did he get that idea from well check it out back in the Tang Dynasty the Chinese notion of music theory music notation and music literacy had begun to spread to Japan during this time the Japanese began to use these Chinese scales to write their Gagaku and show me oh now Gagaku was the music written and performed for the Imperial courts [Music] [Applause] [Music] show me Oh on the other hand was a form of Buddhist chant and was unique to Japan [Music] well the problem during this time was that not a lot of Japanese individuals were super enthusiastic on maintaining any form of consistency for whatever reason the theory annotation began to diverge as it spread throughout Japan different places and musicians would have different meanings for the same term which made communication among musicians difficult and later made it almost impossible for musicologists to create a useful analytical model it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century when a scholar by the name of Fumio Koizumi managed to figure out how the Japanese used their music in short and I know this video is kind of dense on the music theory I promise I'm trying to keep it simple basically the Japanese weren't using full scales that spanned an octave the way that we would use them in the West instead they were using half scales or as Koizumi calls them tetra chords there were four tetra chords they'd all have the same starting and end notes relatively speaking but the note in the middle would be different for each of the four tetra chords and depending on which of the four notes you used in between the top and bottom notes you'd get a different tetrachord so if you wanted a full scale that extended for a full octave the way that we in the West would expect then you just put two tetra chords together in BAM you've got something that looks like a pentatonic scale except that it isn't you can make the western pentatonic scale with this system but this flexible system allows for some pretty crazy configurations that sound uniquely Japanese and in no way shape or form would ever be called pentatonic by Western standards but then World War two happened kind of a sudden topic change I know but with the fallout of World War two Japan ended up adopting a lot of American culture baseball cheerleaders marching band and at some point KFC on Christmas seriously what's up with that but while that was all happening Japan wanted to preserve their musical culture and so we saw the rise of hybrid Japanese western music something like Anka which was a style of pop music that was designed to become kind of like a new style of folk music that maintains something traditionally Japanese and how it sounded something that would feel Japanese but would work in a new Japan that was quickly becoming westernized Oh and in order to compensate for that Japan had to come up with two new scales that would work within the confines of Western harmony but still sound traditionally Japanese and they ended up with the Jana nuki choeung Kai and the Jana nuki tong own Kai or the major pentatonic and minor pentatonic scales of Japan the Jana nuki Chou own Kai or the Japanese major pentatonic scale looks like this which is interesting because our Western major pentatonic scale looks like this they are the exact same and the Jana nuke Etan own Kai or the Japanese minor pentatonic scale looks like this which all joking aside is actually really interesting okay so this is the Japanese minor pentatonic scale but this is the Western minor pentatonic scale okay so just for some context this is the major and minor standard scales in the West sea it's just these three notes that are the difference between the two of them so it looks like they took their major pentatonic scale and did the exact same thing to it that we do to our standard major scale in order to make it our minor scale and that's how they got their minor pentatonic scale which is different from the Western minor pentatonic scale because of modes and consistent intervals bla bla Theory bla bla so long story short the musical history of Japan is complicated and confusing but it ends up emphasizing these pentatonic figures that may or may not cleanly coincide with Western harmonic traditions so what that means is that when his say she writes something that sounds kind of pentatonic but also sort of breaks the rules we know why whether he knows it or not there's some kind of traditional Japanese influence on the way he writes his music and you can see that in all the ways that he breaks from traditional impressionist techniques and even modal jazz that's because whatever he's writing fits into a traditionally Japanese sound which is also why he uses pentatonic figures and shapes in his melodies that might not completely conform to our sense of what a pentatonic scale is and court'll and quintal harmonies fit really well into supporting a pentatonic sound because of pythagoras and triangles and cutting a string into half and thirds and math seriously though these shapes are just the whole pentatonic scale stacked on top of itself but when he breaks the standard shapes or adds harmonic extensions he's still maintaining pretty much every note of some pentatonic scale even though it might not be Western in the only transcription of a Gagaku that I managed to find if you look at the part written for the Biwa which is this instrument right here if you look at what the bee was playing sure enough you see the same portal and quintal harmonies and this is really important as to why his cyi she's music sounds the way that it does you know shaving a haircut if I stop it here it sounds frustrating you need to have that ending for it to sound like it resolves and again it's a complicated musical topic but this piece of music feels like it needs to end orb resolved because of these notes in your regular major scale but these two notes are missing in a pentatonic scale so when you hear a pentatonic scale playing it won't have as much pull in one direction or another as your standard major scale which is something that Debussy liked when he was using similar scales like this whole tone scale it pretty much never resolves and it gives his music that floaty ethereal feeling but with these Japanese pentatonic scales and tetra chords sometimes they feel like they don't resolve sometimes it feels like they do and it's that shift back and forth that can really disrupt a Westerners ears and in some cases makes his syeec sound like Debussy or even modal jazz like take a look at this piece of traditional Japanese folk music written in the Edo period called Sakura Sakura [Music] it can sound kind of haunting but at the same time it may still have that pull to cadence or resolve at the end of a phrase but I'll do you one better check out an even older piece of Japanese folk music written back in the hey in hey Ian hi in period [Music] well you just listen to is Kimi Gallo the national anthem of Japan and this is how it ends [Music] now to Western ears that probably sounds unfinished but that's the end of the piece it sounds unfinished because you're listening to a Japanese piece of music with Western ears you're not familiar with how this music system works so you subconsciously apply the musical language that you're familiar with the same musical language that makes the end of shave and a haircut feel like it has to resolve and the same thing is gonna happen when you sit down and watch a studio ghibli film directed by Hayao Miyazaki in November 2009 Joe Hisaishi was awarded the Medal of Honor with purple ribbon the highest honor a Japanese citizen can achieve the purple ribbon recognizes the individuals academic and artistic developments improvements and accomplishments this is a country that didn't have any significant cultural ties to people like vogner until after their country was devastated by war without vogner there was no one like Korngold and without someone like Korngold there would be no one like John Williams so when his-- ie she had to write a score for a film that was going to have the same kind of influence that Disney had but for a Japanese audience he probably stuck to whatever he knew people would respond to something that would sound comfortable something that would sound familiar so if you listen to a Miyazaki film and you think it sounds pretty or maybe even ethereal there's a chance that being exposed to Western music could have created some kind of bias in your interpretation of music but if he ever got to sit down with someone who was born and raised in Japan and had the opportunity to ask them what they thought of the music Enemy Ozaki film I wonder what they'd say [Music] thank you for watching I'd like to thank my patrons for making these videos possible with a very special thank you to AFN Matt and Anna Burch if you like what you saw here be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos follow me on Twitter and twitch to have your musical questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting my channel on patreon but that's gonna be it from me for now thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 751,351

Rating: 4.9616876 out of 5

Keywords: Miyazaki, Ghibli, Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, Joe Hisaishi, Hisaishi, Anime, Weeaboo, Theory, Music, Music Theory, Why Miyazaki's Films Sound Pretty, Mononoke, Princess Mononoke, Totoro, Spirited Away, Pentatonic, Quartal, Quintal, Japan

Id: 4bZ19hnr8vc

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2017