On love, death, and Joe Hisaishi (also the habanera)
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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Confession: I reeeeally don’t want to write this newsletter today, because last night I saw Joe Hisaishi conducting his movie music at the Hollywood Bowl and now all I want to do with my day is watch Studio Ghibli movies and pretend I have no work or responsibilities.
(While I’m complaining about my life, another small thing that makes me not want to write this newsletter is that I think the E key on my computer is starting to give out, so I have to whack it extra hard, which is just as annoying as performing a piece in E Major on a piano where one of the high E keys has gone out, which is a thing that has actually happened to me.)
When I went to the John Williams concert at the Bowl a few weeks ago, I found myself utterly bemused by the absolute fervor and adulation of the crowd—it was like I was an unprepared anthropologist witnessing an unfamiliar cultural event. It’s not that I don’t like John Williams or his music; I do love his music and I think he’s one of the greatest film composers of all time, but I also don’t have the hugest emotional attachment to the IP he’s scored. We have already been over my relationship to Star Wars, and while everyone expects me as a typical Millennial woman to have made the Harry Potter movies a defining part of my personality, the fact is that I’ve seen 6 out of 8 of the movies only once and my feelings toward them range between neutral tolerance and annoyance.
It’s kind of the same thing with Disney—again, Millennial woman here, I swear most of society expects me to be a Disney Adult who loses her mind when “Part of Your World” comes on, when in fact I grew up feeling…well, neutral tolerance to annoyance at all the Disney princesses. (I did love The Lion King and, in typical Asian-American Millennial fashion, I went absolutely nuts for Mulan, so it’s not like I’m some punk Disney hater over here.)
I sort of snobbishly ascribed my coolness toward what seems like the majority of American musical pop culture to be a sign of my naturally refined taste. (Look, when one is a professional classical musician, one is used to assuming that the self is a lone sophisticated buoy in a sea of philistinism. I’m still working on it.)
Then I lost my damn mind at Joe Hisaishi and realized, oh, I’m just as basic as everyone else.
I just felt so many emotions, you guys, and I know feeling emotions at music is not news, particularly for someone who made the foolish decision to pursue music as a career because she was addicted to feeling emotions at music. But seeing the man himself conduct music that simultaneously captured the soundtrack of my childhood and the poignancy of growing up and the bittersweet joy of adulthood…it was A LOT.
It was also a lot to experience this with close friends and a massive crowd (the Bowl was completely sold out—and had been for months for this show!) that roared like some mythical monster when we, the audience-beast, heard a familiar beloved melody. You have not lived until you have heard 17,500 people scream in ecstasy as one upon hearing the first three notes of the Totoro theme.
(I know everyone thinks of that bouncy main theme when they think of Totoro, but Hisaishi actually led into the rendition with a sweet, aching strain of the second theme, and it made me realize how much the music of Totoro, and the movie itself, captures that poignant impermanency of innocence, of finding a microcosm of magic and adventure against the backdrop of uncertainty and absence that just seems to be the default state of adulthood.)
It was hard to pick a favorite on the program, but I have always maintained that the Princess Mononoke symphonic suite is a staggeringly good concert piece even if you’ve never seen the movie, and should be a standard canonic work along with Beethoven’s 5th and the Rachmaninoff 2nd concerto.
It was absolutely electrifying to hear the second movement live (it starts at 3:18 in the video above)—all that relentless percussion, with the taiko drum just going and going, wow. I was just quietly bouncing with excitement in my seat.
It also—and I realize this is not a new thought, and what many John Williams fans will tell you—is really fun to hear favorite movie music in the context of a concert, because you really do hear everything in a different light. I associate so many moments in Hisaishi’s music with their corresponding scenes from the Ghibli movies that, until last night, I never realized just how skillfully Hisaishi transforms the main theme from Howl’s Moving Castle into a perfectly Straussian Viennese waltz.
Despite being so fun in all its sweeping, lush glory, connoting carefree flourishes of bright silks and sparkling lights, there is something inherently, quietly tragic about the Viennese waltz form—it evokes opulence and joy, yes, but it also speaks of the unsustainable decadence that comes before decay, of the fleeting good times before hardship comes for us all. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hisaishi used the Viennese waltz to accompany a film that overtly depicts the senselessness and selfishness of war and the superficiality of youth and physical beauty. I’m reminded of what people have said about Ravel’s La valse (which I also love). From the Houston Symphony’s program notes for Ravel’s work:
From the beginning, however, listeners began to hear something more than dancers swirling about a ballroom in its music, especially in the wild ending. Even Ravel’s student Manuel Rosenthal discerned in it “a kind of anguish, a very dramatic feeling of death.”
In the aftermath of World War I, the waltz was increasingly seen as a relic of a bygone era—an era that the war had destroyed. Many heard the finale of the piece not merely as a brilliant development of waltz-motifs, but as the distortion and disintegration of the waltz itself: a symbol of a decadent civilization out of control, tearing itself apart. The fact that this was a Viennese waltz added a further layer to some interpretations: Ravel’s piece was perceived specifically as a critique of Austro-German militarism.
Hisaishi’s music, and the Ghibli films in general, are so good at capturing the essence of the human condition: that everything is temporary, and that all our happiness is undergirded by sadness. I’m reminded of Eleanor and Michael’s dialogue from The Good Place:
Eleanor: You're learning what it's like to be human. All humans are aware of death. So we're all a little bit sad... all the time. That's just the deal.
Michael: Sounds like a crappy deal.
Eleanor: Well, yeah. It is. But we don't get offered any other ones.
Later Michael refers to this conversation and completes the realization:
Every human is a little bit sad all the time, because you know you’re gonna die, but that knowledge is what gives life meaning.
I also found myself questioning why so many of the musical moments depicting the not-overly-romantic-but-still-incredibly-romantic relationship between heroines and their love interests brought a lump to my throat when so many love stories leave me absolutely cold. No love story in a Ghibli film is half as overt as a Disney love song, and yet it’s the unspoken devotion that Miyazaki imbues in the boys of his movies that affects me very deeply.
I’d never actually looked up the meaning of the Japanese lyrics to “Mononoke Hime,” so when the translation was projected on screen during the concert I was hit with emotion at the content of the text.
The singer speaks of “coldness,” of the dangerous “beauty of a sharpened blade”—characteristics usually reserved to demonize women, but used with such tender reverence here. To be loved is to be known—not as a projection of someone else’s desires, but as a whole being, imperfect and grand—and I was genuinely moved by this simple statement of love for a wild, cold heroine for who she fundamentally is—including the part of her heart that can never fully be understood. It feels so rare in media and so-called romantic stories for women to be loved in this way with such surrender, and yet it’s par for the course for so many of the boys in Miyazaki’s films: Ashitaka, Tombo, Pazu, Haku, Howl, etc.
Miyazaki boys fall in love without grand declarations or emotional stunts, and more importantly, they have the clarity to see their beloveds for the whole of who they are: they love them for their power, their quirks, the things that society at large sees as imperfection. And when a Miyazaki boy falls in love, he does so unequivocally and unconditionally—he would do anything for the one he loves, not to shield them from the world, but to enable them to move freely through it.
(I say “Miyazaki boys,” but my definition is not confined to male characters; Madame Gina, one of the most iconic fictional characters of all time, is arguably a Miyazaki boy in the manner in which she loves Marco in Porco Rosso.)
I really do think Miyazaki and Hisaishi have taught a whole generation of girls how to be loved, in the most beautiful way possible.
For those of you who did not sign up for philosophical rambling about love and death and demand more hardcore classical music criticism: okay, back to your regularly scheduled content.
Hisaishi also conducted Debussy’s La mer, which I also loved. At first I thought it was an oddball “Well I guess Hisaishi just likes that piece” kind of choice, but as he conducted I realized why it was such a perfect fit on the program. There’s the obvious thematic connection in that La mer depicts the beauty and power of the sea, and Ghibli films are very preoccupied with the beauty and power of the natural world (and how humans just keep messing things up).
But the pairing of Debussy with Hisaishi’s film music made me realize how many influences from La mer and other works you can track throughout Hisaishi’s oeuvre: the brass chorales with open intervals, the playful and driving textures of the strings, the use of percussion to create vertical soundscapes, not just linear rhythm, even some of the harmonic progressions. (The last part of the first movement, starting at about 8:47 below, is so similar to one of the profound moments in Howl’s Moving Castle that it’s staggering.)
It was also a very different La mer from what I’m used to; I’ve played this work as an orchestral violinist, and the default approach seems to lean hard into the Impressionism of it all and make it as blurry and moody as possible. Hisaishi pulled a crispness out of the LA Phil that have never expected to hear in a Debussy orchestral work, and I was gobsmacked by the drily articulated sparkle that totally worked. Hisaishi, you mad genius.
On fear and isolationism
As someone who has never used a dating app, I was not expecting one of the most resonant reads of the week to be this thinkpiece by John Paul Brammer that starts out talking about dating app screenshots and expands into something deeper about human nature:
The self in 2023 is often a solitary project beset on all sides by threats both real and imagined, and a chief goal in these fraught, anxious times is keeping yourself safe from the predators that lurk around every corner who wish you harm, or who want to leech your time and energy, or who want to take advantage of you in some way.
[…]
I’m not saying there aren’t people in this world who want to hurt you, that the world isn’t a dangerous place, that predators don’t exist, or that dating apps aren’t chock full of freaks saying the weirdest, most off-putting things you’ve ever heard. […]
No, I actually don’t have much to say about individuals at all. What I want to get across is that, taking these trends all together, they seem to point to a broad consensus forming that we live in a wicked world populated by predators who are hiding in the periphery of your sight, waiting for the very second that you put your guard down, giving them the opportunity to strike.
In such a world, vigilance is an absolute must, isolation is a wise choice, and boredom is incredibly rampant, leading to what I think of as recreational surveillance. Monitoring other people’s behavior and sending up the worst of it is both a public service and an opportunity to signpost your savviness, to proclaim to the world that you’re not the one to let this kind of deviant behavior get past you.
It feels like, in recent years, countless headlines have been telling us that we are in a loneliness epidemic, that isolation is driving people to extremes, and it’s all very bewildering and alarming to consider how we got here. I think a lot of it is, fundamentally, that we are by evolution fearful animals, and regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, you are bombarded on a daily basis by stories and news using fear—you are in danger, we are all in danger, people are out to get you!—as an easy hook to get your attention, which, in our age of the attention economy, is a path to profit. (It doesn’t help that a lot of the people countering this message with exhortations to love are the most annoying people in the world, some of whom are also trying to sell you something.)
The Pixar film Inside Out unblocked something in me when it explained that Fear—one of the five personified emotions-as-characters—is at heart a being with your best interests in mind who is trying to protect you. It’s gotten a lot easier to cope with my assorted fears and anxieties when I remember that they come from my lizard brain trying to keep me alive.
I think people who isolate themselves—succumbing to the self-soothing mechanism of living a life defined by fear and constructing a narrative where nothing and no one can be trusted—are people unwilling to accept that the world is fundamentally, uncontrollably, chaotic, and that we are all going to die. It is easier to feel like you are protecting yourself by refusing human connection than it is to acknowledge that there is no accounting for randomness and uncertainty, and while my usual diagnosis is that people who are too online and crazed from the social isolation need to just touch grass, I do thing Brammer is onto something with his analysis that modern life is structured to keep us isolated, and that we are so often rewarded for giving in to fear.
Anyway. I’m starting to digress, and I don’t need to go on a second philosophical trek, having already taken one earlier when I started talking about Viennese waltzes. Brammer’s piece is very good and I think people should read it.
A habanera journey
It’s always fun to learn something that wasn’t covered in music school; in this case, I learned something this week about habanera rhythm. Let’s start with where I started, which in this case is backwards.
I was listening to “Rotten Town” off Ludo’s 2010 album Prepare the Preparations and thinking about how much I kind of really love pop music that riffs on classical material. I’m fully aware that habanera rhythm is not a classical invention, but it’s one of those quirks of Western pop culture that if you hear the habanera, it’s a reference to Bizet’s Carmen (starting at 2:09 in the video below):
Another song I absolutely love that is directly based on the habanera from Carmen is…well, “Carmen” by Stromae:
(An aside: I love the parallelism of the lines “Et c'est comme ça qu'on s'aime s'aime s'aime s'aime / Comme ça consomme somme somme somme somme,” linking the illusion of love with our impulses to consume, consume, consume.)
One of the problems with the way musical knowledge is taught, at least in the way I experienced it in a pretty traditional conservatory curriculum, is that a lot of facts are just given to you out of context, and everything that isn’t Western classical music (which is actually, globally and historically, the majority of music that exists) is shoved into a single semester World Music class, so you can’t really go on cultural or historical deep dives of any given concept. A classic example I like to give of this is that Chopin is taught to pianists as a distillation of Polish musical idioms and yet we are not actually taught any Polish music for context.
I was told that the habanera was a traditional rhythm that Bizet, a French composer, used in Carmen to give it that exotic Spanish feel, though it still existed in my consciousness as “the Carmen pattern.”
So it was a trip to Google “habanera rhythm” this week and discover that the habanera is a variant on the tresillo, which is actually Cuban. It made its way into European art music, mostly via Bizet, but also through Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Here’s a solo piano work, “Souvenir de la Havane,” where Gottschalk puts the habanera in the left hand:
However, the tresillo wasn’t invented in Cuba; according to Wikipedia, it’s one of the most fundamental rhythmic cells from Sub-Saharan Africa, and was introduced to the New World via the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Basically, this rhythm is one of the oldest musical building blocks we have, with entirely non-Western roots, and I think that is so cool and fascinating: this simple little riff which I associate with a canonic French opera actually has a much longer, richer life of its own, with so much historical baggage.
Every time now that I hear this rhythm winking at me from an aria or pop song, I’ll know that it has ancient roots, older than nations and passed down musician to musician, wearing wildly different clothes through the centuries but remaining fundamentally unchanged. God, I love music. 🎹
(P.S. No newsletter next week. See you all in September!)