Music Minus One
A new movie soundtrack brings to mind one of the most daring and inventive Japanese composers of his time.
I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound: a sound that won’t dissipate over time. Essentially, the opposite of a piano, because the notes never fade. I suppose, in literary terms, it would be like a metaphor for eternity.
―Ryuichi Sakamoto
I recently had the pleasure of seeing Takashi Yamazaki’s latest film, Godzilla Minus One. I knew the film had good reviews, but I assumed that meant good for a Godzilla movie, a genre I know little about. To my pleasant surprise, the film was good—full stop. The plot is standard fare: Godzilla appears as Japan lies in the rubble of World War II (“ground zero”) to sink the nation even deeper into despair (“minus one”). The characters, however, are human, written with emotion and not sentiment, and portrayed with skill and grace. The film has many qualities—not the least of which are Yamazaki’s signature stunning special effects—but one stood out above the others: the film’s excellent score by Naoki Sato.
Scoring a film in the Godzilla franchise is no easy task, given the reverence in which the score of the first (1954) film—composed by Akira Ifukube—is held by fans. Sato wisely incorporated the original theme and built a somber, almost elegiac soundscape around it, which suits the dark nature of this incarnation of a beast that symbolizes man’s ultimate destructive power. Sato’s score has been well received, with one critic calling it “complicated, unconventional, uncompromising, sometimes difficult, but deeply impressive.” Of its many parts, the highlight for me is “Resolution,” which is heard at the climactic moment when the film’s hero must overcome his crushing fear to save his homeland. In that sequence, we hear a relentless three-note figure representing Godzilla played by strings, to which Sato adds a hesitant trumpet line (again, three-note) at 2:05 that symbolizes the hero’s arrival (and mindset), followed by the (asynchronous) choral battle at 3:45. The music is subtle and deep, filled with a sad acceptance of a fate that must be confronted and to which one must surrender.
Listening to the full score repeatedly at home, I was struck by its resemblance to the film music of one of the finest Japanese composers of recent times, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sakamoto was a singular talent I first encountered when I lived in Japan many years ago. I have followed his career since then, marveling at his skill and relentless musical evolution.
Sakamoto was born in 1950 in Tokyo, started playing the piano at six, and began composing at ten. In his youth, he loved Bach and Debussy, whom he called “the door to all 20th century music.” He earned a BA and MA in music from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. A few years after leaving school, he and two friends formed the Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978. They soon scored several hits and eventually sold millions of records, all of which made Sakamoto a star in Japan. YMO helped pioneer electronic music. Sakamoto could have stayed in that lane and built a typical commercial music career; however, the group disbanded only six years later, and he took his music in new directions. The first track on the video below, “Heartbeat,” with vocals by the avant-garde British vocalist David Sylvian, is typical of his early solo work.
Though Sakamoto’s music was usually serious, he had a sense of humor, as we hear on “Sentimental,” below, a duet with Vivian Sessoms in which a couple complains about each other at length only to admit they could never live apart.
Though his “pop” music output is worthy of respect, it was through film composition that Sakamoto raised his art to its highest level. The first film he scored was Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the story of a British prisoner of war in World War II and his Japanese captors. The main theme of that score was to become his signature work and an iconic piece of music in Japanese culture. It has been covered by many artists in Japan and abroad in various genres. Sakamoto himself recorded several versions, and perhaps the most representative is the one that appeared in his 2013 release, Playing the Orchestra.1
Sakamoto went on to score many films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, for which he won an Academy Award with fellow composers David Byrne and Cong Su. He also wrote the music for Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels, Bertolucci’s The Little Buddha, Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes, as well as Babel, which was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who also asked him to score The Revenant. Of the music he wrote for films not well known in the West, my favorite is his work for Shunsaku Kawake’s Shinning Boy and Little Randy. In the movie, a Japanese boy goes to Thailand with the dream of becoming the first Japanese elephant trainer, and the story explores the bond of friendship he develops with the animals he once planned to master.
Though most of the films he scored were dramas, Sakamoto was happy to work on lighter fare. A delightful example of this form is his collaboration with the Japanese musician Kotringo on the 2012 Japanese romantic comedy set in Paris called I Have To Buy New Shoes.2 The standout track of the score is called “La Seine.” It is musical French pastry, of course, but—like everything else Sakamoto made—of the highest quality.
From his earliest days, Sakamoto valued collaboration and an expansive musical landscape, perhaps dating back to his interest in musical anthropology in graduate school. One of his finest partnerships was with the Brazilian musician Jaques Morelenbaum and his daughter, Paula. They released two albums as a team, including one recorded live in New York City. Their recording of the Antonio Carlos Jobim standard, “Samba de Aviao” (Song of the Jet), is a highlight track on which Sakamoto playfully quotes “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” at 3:35.
As he grew older, Sakamoto’s solo work returned to his roots in electronica, with compositions that became increasingly austere, focused on structure, and suffused with computer-generated sonics. Collaborating with artists working, once again, at the avant-garde, Sakamoto made a series of what might be termed experimental albums that were mostly instrumentals but whose occasional lyrics explored fundamental themes of human existence, as he does in “War and Peace” below.
In June 2014, Sakamoto was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer, about which he said the following a year later:
Right now I’m good. I feel better. Much, much better. I feel energy inside, but you never know. The cancer might come back in three years, five years, maybe 10 years. Also the radiation makes your immune system really low. It means I’m very susceptible to another cancer in my body.
In the years after his diagnosis, he used his music to meditate on life and mortality. During this time, he released an album called async, inspired by Debussy, in which he “plays with ideas of a-synchronism, prime numbers, chaos, quantum physics and the blurred lines of life and artificiality/noise and music.”3 Sakamoto conceived the album as the soundtrack for an imaginary movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker whose works often explore mortality. When making async, said Sakamoto, “I just wanted to hear sounds of things, everyday things, even the sounds of instruments, musical instruments as things,” adding that the sound art sculptor Harry Bertoia had been a major influence on his creation.4 In the track below, “andata,” he seems to present his requiem, built through a deeply layered sonic landscape that, as it evolves, brings me back to Sato’s “Resolution.”
Over his long career, Sakamoto released various solo piano albums, including 2009’s “Playing the Piano,” in which he recorded many of the same songs in new ways on different pianos. In 2020, as I imagine he knew his time was running short, he released his final solo album, “Playing the Piano 12122020” (the same year he performed a unique concert for those isolated by the pandemic). The collection is a great artist looking back at his work, contemplating its meaning, and reinterpreting it at the gates of death. I find it the most interesting of all his solo works, especially his arrangement of “Bibo no Aozora” (Beauty of a Blue Sky)—the main theme from the Babel score. This final performance seems to me a meditation on existence, feeling, and yearning. It is a song of life and death, as well as the culmination of a lifetime engaged with one instrument.
On January 21, 2021, Sakamoto announced that he had been diagnosed with rectal cancer and that he was undergoing treatment. “From now on,” he said, “I will be living alongside cancer. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer.” He died on March 28, 2023, at the age of 71.
When I first started learning the piano, I ordered a book of his music from Japan. It contains a short composition called “Fountain” that I don’t believe he ever released. It is the first of his pieces I ever learned to play. I recorded my arrangement at home yesterday and made it into a simple video, which I share below as my small homage. Sakamoto’s death lessened my musical world, but I take consolation in an old saying he liked to quote: life is short, but art is long.
At the other end of the musical spectrum is this version from the Japanese band Snow’s 2009 album, Fact.
According to Wikipedia: “The name ‘Kotringo’ is a combination of sounds taken from the Japanese words for small birds (kotori) and apple (ringo). The name comes from the fact that Kotringo had always kept a pet bird since childhood, and because she used to eat an apple every day.”
https://milanrecords.com/ryuichi-sakamoto-async-out-today/
https://ra.co/features/2983