ASIA
MINOR & OTHER EASTERN MODES: Part 2
Sukiyaki, Chow Mein, Minestrone
published in The Wire No.162, August, 1997,
London
For
the West, the terrain of 'world music' is mapped by the otherness
of alien cultures and their difference to Eurocentric harmony
and rhythm. This is smelly musicology at best: African, Asian
, Pacific & Latin musics are defined by their own identity
and history, and not by their blunt contrast to Western convention.
Subsequently, part of their identity is shaped by their distorted
mirroring of the same Western conventions to which they appear
so different. The beauty of 'world music' - despite the attempts
of musicological purists - is that it is as dilutable, distillable,
combustible and compoundable as the most impure pop music we produce.
Postwar Japan - a gleaming, highly designed, decidedly 'un-ethnic'
environment - is the most fertile ground where these impurities
take root and blossom, nurturing a peculiar Easterness lined with
contradiction.
What
is this Easterness I'm talking about? What does it sound like?
What is its flavour? Taste Humio Nayasaka's score for Akira Kurosawa's
THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954). It commences with a long fade-up of
authentic Japanese military drumming (the key rhythm for the whole
score), then is halted by a bizarre male vocal chorus harmonizing
a brief motif straight from a 19th Century New England barber
shop quartet. Then the real weirdness begins: a melody in a traditional
folk modal is played against some overly-relaxed 20s-style razzamatazz
brass harmonies. The mind can't even begin to conjure a collaged
image to match the music. This isn't a disembodied Arabian vocal
line slapped onto a mid-70s funk break-beat: this is total molecular
fusion at the score's aural centre.
Yet
while a cultural whirlpool draws the Western ear into a spiral
of misinterpretations, the function of Nayasaka's score is deceptively
straightforward: he has composed a theme that embodies the numerous
conflicting traits of the seven personalities upon which the film's
action, drama and pathos rides. The score - as musical character
script - connotes headiness, rashness, sobriety, reserve, cunning,
mawkishness, triumph, fear. All at once. Western film composers
- inheriting the grandiose and heroic traditions chiselled into
the marble busts of 18th/19th century romantic composers - structure
their scores to synchronize minute musical tinctures to every
emotional drop wrung from the screen. This mania for synchronization
belies the predictable delusion that by timing music to action
and mimicking emotional states, one somehow controls that action
like a grand wizard. Ultimately, this approach is literal, linear,
laboured. THE SEVEN SAMURAI's composition is radically opposed:
it is lateral, liquid, loose. The score's contrary themes have
been deliberately writ according to a densely webbed logic of
asynchronism: music never coincides, motifs never coalesce, moments
never congeal.
If
Godzilla's gorgeously gross footsteps are imprints of the Japanese
soundtrack's carefully crafted explosiveness, the polymorphous
tonality of THE SEVEN SAMURAI evidences the Japanese film score's
wavering harmonic colour. It serves as our musicological earpiece
to over a century of musical mutations - particularly in the first
half of this century when popular Japanese music was excited by
the inflections and intonations of European and American jazz.
The point is that Japanese music was not simply 'modernized' this
century: it has been genetically altered. It is simultaneously
a traditional past, an eclectic present and an imagined future,
and it thrives on this ahistorical blend of shifting possibilities.
One
of the themes in THE SEVEN SAMURAI is played by - of all things
- a tenor sax. That would be as formally anachronistic as having
a twanging electric guitar in an American western. But not an
Italian western. Cineastes can cite that THE SEVEN SAMURAI was
remade in Hollywood as THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and that Sergio
Leone remade Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (1961) into A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
(1963) - yet they ignore that Ennio Morricone imported the musical
sukiyaki of THE SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO to Leone's spaghetti
westerns. Masaru Satoh's score for YOJIMBO is influential in many
respects. YOJIMBO ('thief') is one of many Kurosawa films based
on the character Toshio Mifune played in THE SEVEN SAMURAI, through
which he defined a rebel/loner spirit who exhibited a strangely
Eastern existentialism while engaged in acts of extreme violence.
Satoh's main theme casts him as a wry, laconic, playful, gruff,
perverse, likeable rogue, roaming through an absurdly vicious
landscape. Again, the music conveys all these traits simultaneously
through the mix of incongruous elements in the arrangement: electric
guitar, bongoes and harpsichord jostle against brooding Gothic
intonations (which owe a strained debt to Stravinsky's distinctive
orchestral colouration). Just as Marco Polo imported noodles from
the Chinese to make Italian pasta, Morricone fused this postwar
Japanese eclecticism with an equally unique Italian tradition
of excessive ornamentation. Listen and you will taste it.
The
60s in Japan is a radical time wherein its post-nuclear condition
(and its postmodern effects) are made manifest. Parallel to its
industrial rise, electronics revolution and urban rebirthing (peaking
for the 1966 Tokyo Olympics), Japan's entertainment and recording
industries go into overdrive, accelerating their importation of
styles and devices. If global centres like Paris and New York
have been symbolized by dumb architectural edifices like the Eiffel
Tower & the Empire State Building, Tokyo is symbolized by
Tokyo Tower: a broadcast/receiver. The Japanese were - and still
are - sucking in the infosphere of the West and extruding it into
unimaginable forms, constructs and mechanisms. This is the very
characteristic of data dispersion which influenced Stockhausen's
TELEMUSIK (1966), composed as an impression of Tokyo's overload
of broadcast communications. At that time, Japan was the socio-industrial
construct of what futurists and experimentalists had been poetically
imagining for over fifty years. Not suprisingly, the Japanese
soundtrack - recording the collapse of sound, noise and music
into each other - captures and renders the aural dissolve between
all levels of sonic and musical signification.
Horoyuki
Nagashima's score for Sogo Ishi's ANGEL DUST (1995) is Stockhausen's
TELEMUSIK revisited. The film is sublime on many levels, but its
sound design and film score (each impossible to separate from
the other) constitute a delicate yet assaultive collage of musical
fragments which hurtle, jettison and freeze mid-air throughout
the film like a series of alien objects. I say ' objects' because
the score to ANGEL DUST seems an arrangement of pre-composed pieces
which are then savagely excerpted, cross-faded and inserted as
glimpses on one's aural periphery. No cues, no passages, no sections.
Only an onslaught of textures which signify the presence of musicality
without actually advancing any music. It is almost as if Nagashima
is doing a live broadcast of the film soundtrack by wildly flicking
through the tuner dials of a bank of short wave radios. Music
comes and goes, leaving one more conscious of its presence than
its content, more massaged by the extremities of its frequency
range than by its formal orchestration.
In
its frenetic editing and mixing, ANGEL DUST simultaneously evokes
the work of Haruomi Hosono, Ken Ishi, DJ Shadow, K. K. Knull,
Solmania & Ryoji Ikeda - all of whom have in their own way
revived and reclaimed Stockhausen's highly materialist concept
of the electronic globe (a sono-musical appreciation of information
technologies as opposed to the 90s appropriation of McLuhan's
immaterial ideas of global media convergence). In short, the Japanese
actively sound these ideas: they sculpt noise, paint tones and
cast timbres in reflection of the post-nuclear environment within
which their recording industry is situated, giving us a rush of
shivers, spasms and stabs in the name of music. ANGEL DUST may
superficially sound planets away from THE SEVEN SAMURAI, but the
technique of deftly combining diverse elements into a heterogenous
musical landscape is as evident in both films as it is absent
in the Western film score tradition.
Sogo
Ishi's most recent film - THE LABYRINTH OF DREAMS (1997) - proves
that this Eastern sensibility is operating beyond both classical
and romantic precepts of musical convention. The score by Hiroyuki
Onagawa may aesthetically sound like beautiful ambient stylings
(certainly it is lushly textured without drooping into New Age
upholstery) yet the rubric of dispersion, aura and diffusion governs
the placement and progression of the score's many incidental moments.
It's flow and momentum cojoins ANGEL DUST at a deeper level, where
harmonious discord and tempered dissonance reflect the Japanese
philosophical acceptance of the how beauty and ugliness are at
one with the other.
This
meld of the beautiful and the ugly breathes through every audio-visual
fibre that cross-threads Kiju Yoshida's ONIMARU (Demon Child,
1988) - a spare Eastern-Gothic film loosely based on Jane Austen's
WUTHERING HEIGHTS. The cinematography consistently frames its
characters with contemplative pictorial nuance, alienating their
being in the spaces which trap them. Outdoors, the film's minuscule
figures carve elegant lines of movement across the barren spread
of the Sacred Mountain (an unforgivingly barren moonscape of volcanic
grey). Indoors, the same figures are frozen in hermetic relief
against the austere minimalism of the mountain's feudal mansions.
The score by Toru Takemitsu enhances the many splits between interior
psychological states and exterior action, between repressed silence
and uncontrolled utterance, between the vast ugly noise of the
mountain and the strained beautiful ambience of the mansion. Simply,
whenever we are inside, we hear tuned wind drafts and tunnelled
air vents; outside, we hear no natural sound effects, but only
the murmur of music and the rumble of ill-defined orchestration.
Characteristically reverent of music's accord to film narrative,
Takemitsu actively de-composes this score as the situation warrants
it, excusing himself of the bolshy heroism that so governs the
domain of the film composer. With rooms that hum, wind that sings,
walls that exhale and clothes that sigh, ONIMARU is perhaps the
most potent musical example of how the Japanese soundtrack is
the sound of the west turned inside out.
