Episode 15 — Spirited Away, modular expression and mild despair
In this extended episode, Steve starts with a clear-eyed look at why so many musicians are feeling squeezed — closed venues, broken touring economics, squeezed teaching, streaming pennies and the looming impact of AI — before pivoting back to why music, community and silliness still matter. From there he dives into modular synths with composer and producer Jay Chakravorty, exploring bleepy-bloopy infinity machines as genuinely expressive instruments, and then sits down with director John Caird, music supervisor Brad Haak and co-adaptor Maoko Imai to unpack the stage adaptation of Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki & Joe Hisaishi's soundworld, and why ambiguity, silence and musical nuance beat bombast every time.
Patreon supporters can hear the full modular jam Jay builds live in the studio and extended Spirited Away conversations, including deeper dives into image albums, Boy and the Heron comparisons, and how the London production reshapes Hisaishi's score for the stage.
What we cover
Mild despair, honestly explained: Why UK musicians are being crushed from four sides at once — live, education, streaming and AI — and what real support looks like.
Modular expression: Jay's Eurorack setup as "infinity machine", oscillators, filters, LFOs, clocking, patching-as-plumbing, and why unpredictability is a creative partner not a gimmick.
Electronic music with soul: Debunking the "no soul in synths" myth, embracing imperfection, and placing modular in the same long arc as shells, horns and flutes.
Spirited Away on stage: How Caird, Haak and Imai earned Studio Ghibli's trust, re-orchestrated Hisaishi's score, and staged the show at the London Coliseum without turning it into a Disney-style musical.
Joe Hisaishi's harmonic language: Fifths, modes, ambiguity, "One Summer's Day", Kaonashi's "Lonely" theme and why his music refuses to tell you exactly how to feel.
Silence and trust: Miyazaki's use of stillness versus Hollywood wall-to-wall scoring, and how that philosophy survives in the theatre adaptation.
Further listening & links
Counter Chamber (alternative classical/minimal/electronic night Jay co-runs)
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I am a musician, composer and performer from London. And this is my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is the show that helps you to hear and understand music in new ways. Hello Musically Curious People, welcome back. Thank you for lending me your ears for this special sort of double length bumper edition of the show today. It's lovely to be back, as always. And of course, thank you for the feedback on episode 14, the previous episode of this show, where I talked to Eliza, the brilliant soul and R&B singer, about motherhood, about revealing her pregnancy live on stage at the Forum. Amazing story and amazing footage on my social media, if you go and check that out, it's really worth a watch. And of course, then I had a fascinating chat with Verity Simmons, the brilliant cellist, and she showed me how the cello works, some different techniques. She played some beautiful, beautiful Bach and other cello music and just generally was an all-round good egg in sharing her knowledge about that beautiful instrument. And then to finish up, I took a dive into Ebo rap from Nigeria and I unpicked a piece of Ebo rap, kind of dismantled it by turning it back into a rhythm on the drum, on the djembe drum, and then kind of reassembling it with the original track, which I found really, really interesting. And I know lots of you did too. So thank you for the feedback. As always, your feedback is really, really appreciated. And even more appreciated is if you can give the show a review and five stars and all that business if you're enjoying it. Lots of you have done that. Thank you very much. But we're a small independent show and I'm competing with some big, major international broadcasters and podcast networks and all sorts. So yeah, it was really appreciated. If you can lend me your support, speaking of which, while we're doing plugs early on, please do go to the Patreon and support there. A few more of you have done that since the last episode. So thank you so much for that. It's really building into a nice little community where we can have conversations. You can request topics that I talk about. We can have a little chat about the show, ask any questions, that sort of thing. So if you go to originofthepieces.com, you can get to the Patreon and my mailing list and all sorts of things from there. Right, plugs out of the way. On with the show. Coming up in today's show, I have a really interesting chat with Jay Chakravorty, a fantastic musician, composer and modular synth maestro. He has an amazing collection of modular synths. And for those of you who don't know what that is, stay tuned and you will find out. Basically it looks like mission control for the space shuttle or something. It's quite something to see and even more to hear. So stay tuned for that. And then of course I have a long and fascinating interview with some of the creative team behind the new production of Spirited Away, the Miyazaki film, that's been turned into an incredible stage show and
is gonna be running in London in the Coliseum, an absolutely enormous theater, 2,500 seats, between now, so that's early May, and mid August. I had a really, really interesting chat about the music that goes into that show and about that whole Studio Ghibli sound and look. So it's a really interesting interview. So stay tuned for that. But first, as I record this, it is International Jazz Day. It's the end of April. Now, if you're new to the podcast, you may not know that I am a jazz musician. I work as a jazz trumpet player, and I have done for most of my career, amongst lots of other things, producer, mixer, composer, all of that stuff. But yeah, jazz trumpet playing has been my sort of bread and butter for a long time. But for those of you who've listened a lot and heard me talk about jazz, you may be relieved to hear that I'm not gonna bang on about jazz today too much. Instead, I want to just talk about the plight of jazz musicians. And actually not even just jazz musicians, but really musicians in general. Because I think I've been thinking about this quite a lot really in the last few weeks. And basically everyone I talk to, there's a general air of slight despair about the state of the entertainment industry, the music industry at the moment. And so I kind of thought, you know, it's not the happiest of subjects. And I generally try and keep things upbeat and positive in this show. But I just thought it's probably about time that we address the fact that a lot of musicians are finding life very tough at the moment. Now look, of course, it's all relative, you know, first world problems, all the rest of it. Of course, I understand that completely. And as someone who basically gets to muck about and make silly noises for a living, I appreciate the incredible privilege that that is and how I'm very, very lucky to be able to do what I love and all that stuff. And so I'm not really so much talking about me. I'm incredibly lucky. I am finding aspects of the industry quite tough at the moment for reasons I'll go into shortly, but it's not really about, oh, you know, woe is me. I get to make silly noises for a living. And you know, that's slightly harder than it used to be. Of course, many people are stuck in jobs that they don't really like doing, that aren't paid properly. This is not a problem that is specific to musicians. Of course, I totally understand and appreciate that. So please don't take this in the wrong way. But I just wanted to talk briefly about the different ways in which musicians are being squeezed at the moment, because it does feel like it's kind of coming from several quarters. I think it's fair to say that most of us don't go into music thinking that's a great way of getting rich, right? I mean, no one has ever done that. And if they have, they're a fool because, you know, that's never been a route to great riches. I've talked in the past on this show about how music is often as much of a vocation as a profession and about how I think, you know, the distinction between amateur music and professional music is in some ways an arbitrary one and, you know, a bit of a false dichotomy.
But at the same time, if we want to have people who dedicate themselves to music in order to be able to perhaps push the boundaries of music or to be incredibly skilled at their craft of playing the instrument or writing songs or whatever it might be, then that professional class of musicians is something that we should value. Again, as I've talked about quite a lot, there are responsibilities both ways. There are definitely responsibilities with professional musicians to reach out more and to not put ourselves on a pedestal and to embrace working with amateurs or working with new musicians or working with listeners, audiences, all of that stuff. Anyway, let's get on with what I think the current issues are. This is partly prompted by the conversations I've had both through the podcast, for the people I've interviewed on the podcast. Before I start the recording, often we'll have a chat about how things are going and almost universally, the opinion seems to be, yeah, things are really tough at the moment. And of course, that's also true when I'm doing gigs and talking to other musicians there as well. So it's, you know, this is not just me saying, oh, things are tricky at the moment. This is a well- recognized thing because the other place it was really recognized in the last couple of weeks was a big article in the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which was talking about the different ways that we're being squeezed, right? So I want to kind of address three or four of those very, very quickly. The first of which is the live music industry. Now I started my career as predominantly a live musician, playing live, playing trumpet and sometimes other things. Things on that front are pretty much worse than I've ever known them in the sense that touring costs are very expensive. So if you've got an artistic project that you want to tour, want to take on the road and do shows, touring costs are very expensive. So hiring vans, fuel, cost of living in general is very expensive. All of these expenses have gone up, but the fees, if anything, have gone down or certainly at best stayed where they were. But more importantly than that, a lot of venues, a lot of the small and mid- sized venues and not even the small and mid-sized, some of the bigger venues, playing up to a couple of thousand people are really struggling. Those venues are really struggling. And so that's then passed on in some cases to the artist who then no longer get the fees that they were used to, as I say, or they get the same fees, but all of their other costs have gone up. They're not able to make any sort of decent income themselves from those shows after paying everyone else. But the other thing that's happening is that a lot of venues are closing. And again, I've addressed this on the show in the past, but a lot of small and mid-sized venues are shutting down permanently often. One of my favorite venues in the world closed within the last couple of weeks, a venue called The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, which to my mind is pretty much a one-venue music scene, an incredible bar that used to put on gigs. Certainly during the Fringe Festival, it puts on seven, eight gigs a day sometimes, absolutely crazy, from sort of 10.30, 11 a.m. to four or five a.m. every day throughout the Fringe. And even outside of the festival time, they put on often three gigs
a night at the weekend, sometimes more, and live music pretty much every night. It's always a musician hangout. You get musicians going down there, not just jazz musicians, but musicians of many flavors. It's very much a late night hang, where you can go there and meet other musicians. Maybe you have a drink, maybe you go up on stage and play for a couple of tunes. That venue has been really central to my life whenever I've been working in Edinburgh, which is a lot over the years, and it's gone. And that means that that whole scene is basically devastated. I'm sure people are resilient. People will find places to play. I'm sure things will spring up again. But it's really, really serious. And that is happening across the country, across, I'm sure, across other countries as well. But I'm specifically talking about the UK here. So that's the live scene, that things are very, very tricky. Then of course, you've got music education. Now, a lot of musicians rely for much of their income on teaching and that kind of thing. And of course, in one sense, that hasn't gone anywhere. There are always music teachers around. There's always music programmes. But it's just been radically devalued, I think, in the last few years. Arts education is just not valued in the way that many of us think it should be. It's not funded. And so, yeah, there's the limited teaching opportunities. I've never really sort of relied too much on teaching. I've done a little bit of private teaching here and there. So this aspect hasn't particularly impacted me directly, but certainly for a lot of my colleagues who rely for much of their income on teaching, on teaching, that's, you know, it's a struggle. It's still there, but it's undervalued, often underpaid. The conditions are getting worse. Lots of zero hours contracts, that kind of thing. So that's the second strand. The third strand is of course, streaming royalties and income from selling music that you've made. Now this has been much discussed. I don't need to talk about this in any great detail here. I'm sure many of you listening to this will know a lot about this because you'd have read it in the press about, you know, the tiny amounts of money that things like Spotify and Apple Music generate for us, music creators, us composers and band leaders and musicians. And it is a really serious problem. I mean, once again, I want to slightly preface this by saying that I do think that sometimes we should see this in a wider context. And I think when people hark back to a golden age of say in the nineties when record companies were charging 16 pounds for a CD, you know, 16 pounds in 1995 money. So that's whatever that would be now, probably at least double like 30 quid for a CD. Imagine paying 30 quid for a CD. That was a blip in the history of music, in my opinion, the ability to charge that sort of money and make a very, very, very small number of musicians extremely rich. I think that was, you know, an anomaly in the history of music. But that said, it is expensive to make music. It's yes, okay, it's cheaper than it's ever been because people can make music in their bedrooms now, in studios and on laptops and
things. But equally, the amount of money that that music then generates has got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and makes it almost impossible to make any money from that side. And so, you know, the argument goes, oh, well, musicians make money from touring. But I refer you to my earlier point, musicians now don't make money from touring really. So yeah, the streaming income, that kind of thing is really tough. And the fourth strand is, as a composer, that is really tricky as well, because of course we've got the encroachment of AI. Now that's again, it's a subject for a whole episode really, because the implications there are fascinating and some of them very positive, many of them very negative. But what it means is that I think a lot of music that's made for media, so for TV, for film, for adverts, and that kind of thing, which I've done a little bit of, and you know, always very keen to do that because I really like writing for the screen. But that side of things is being hoovered up by AI. And I think within the next couple of years, the lower end of that, so adverts and low budget TV and things is going to be absolutely dominated by cheap or almost free AI music that's custom written for those shows. There are AI models out there now that people are already using for adverts, just with some text prompts, that's it. That's already happening. Now, each of those strands individually are quite bad, but there's a good argument that you could make for saying, well, technological progress happens. We need to move with the times. And I think that's fair enough. As musicians, we shouldn't fear technology. We should embrace it where we can, fine. But that's happening at the same time as people aren't coming out to gigs. It's happening at the same time as governments are underfunding the arts spectacularly. It's happening at the same time that music education is being radically devalued. All of these squeezes are kind of happening simultaneously. And the problem is that on the balance sheet, I've spoken to friends who work in the civil service or in government or wherever, and it looks like the music industry is doing quite well because the bottom line of the treasury balance sheet says, oh, it's quite healthy, but that's because you've got your Taylor Swift's and your Ed Sheeran's selling out record tours and stadiums and all that kind of thing. The problem is that that is not trickling down quite the opposite. When people are paying 750 quid to go and see Taylor Swift, they're not gonna necessarily pay 25 quid, 30 quid, 15 quid to go and see a gig in a small or medium sized venue. And so those venues go under or they book the safest possible things, Tribute Acts, that kind of thing. Listen, no disrespect to either Tribute Acts or to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. I have enormous respect for people at both ends of that, you know, the Tribute Acts, and the Ed Sheeran's and the Taylor Swift's. That is what it is. But yeah, you can see where the problem is. The top end, people spending enormous amounts of money to go to huge stadium shows, but no one's paying for the stuff in the middle. Equally, a small number of people are being made extremely wealthy
by things like Spotify. People are making money out of music. It's just not the musicians. And again, twas ever thus, I know Mozart struggled to survive and had to work for patrons, for rich patrons who would pay him to write stuff he didn't necessarily want to do. That's fine. That's always going to be the way. Again, we don't come into this world to make lots of money, but it is getting to a point where things are a little bit bleak. So I'm sorry to go on a slightly bleak rant. It's been on my mind quite a bit recently, just because, as I say, everyone I talk to in my world tells a similar tale of, you know, yeah, things are all right, but things are tough. Certainly massively tougher than they were pre-pandemic. Partly related to the pandemic, partly related to lots of other structural stuff, as I've mentioned. Anyway, there we go, rant over. I guess the positive to come out of this is please support musicians. If you're able to support people financially through maybe buying their music on Bandcamp or going to see a gig or supporting them through Patreon, which of course you can do for me as well, but not just me, for lots of people doing amazing stuff, that is a really, really valuable way of supporting people who create music and make music professionally, directly, right? There's no greater power than that, to be honest, because that money comes straight to us. It doesn't go via too many middlemen along the way. So yeah, if you're able to do that financially, please do. Look, I know things are really difficult and quite bleak for a lot of people in all sorts of industries at the moment, so not everyone will be able to do that. That's fine. I guess I'm just saying, if you're able to show, you know, that bit of extra compassion for musicians who've always had it tough and who've always had a bit of a roller coaster ride, that's part of the fun of being a musician in some twisted way, please do show them a bit of extra love if you're able to, because as I say, things are tricky. Anyway, enough of that. On to more positive things. Come to the show. So my first guest on this episode is an absolutely amazing musician. I met him through the brilliant night called Counter Chamber that he runs with Samuel Sharp, which is a sort of alternative classical night, I suppose you would call it. It's in a bar in Hackney, and they have crossover classical, minimalist electronic, you know, neoclassical kind of music. I played there myself, as I think Jay alludes to in this interview, and it's a really great night. But anyway, Jay is also a really fantastic musician in his own right, playing all sorts of instruments, guitar, keyboards, and what we've been talking about today, which is the modular synth. So without further ado, let's go over to Jay in his studio in South London to hear about modular synths. Here we go. My name is Jay Chakravorty. I am a composer and session musician and producer. And we're in your incredible home studio, this little corner of your house, which is sort of small and compact, but absolutely chock full
of amazing stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of rammed with synths and equipment and guitars and stuff. It's my favourite bit of the house. It would absolutely be mine as well. People might have seen my studio set up at home and it's like a sort of, yeah, living room version of that as well. Just a lot of amazing stuff. I feel like the more compact it is for me, the more I can focus. I think if I had a big room with everything around, I would only use the stuff that's within my arm reach. So here, everything is within my arm reach. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe you could just talk us through what we got going on here. Sure. One wall of my studio is just a stack of synths, essentially. I've got loads of different ones that all kind of do a slightly different thing. Synths all kind of look the same, a keyboard and a bunch of knobs, but each one has its own particular functions and its own particular sound or characteristic. So we've got one in the middle here, where the oscillators are famously kind of growly. And what I mean by oscillator is just like the thing that makes the noise, the actual sound itself is kind of growly and aggressive. Sorry to interrupt, but I was just going to say, with the oscillators, the way I think I've explained it in the past is all music is vibration of some sort, right? And the oscillator is turning a vibrating current into a vibrating sound, right? So the vibrating current just vibrates at a rate that we process as a note. Yeah. So you plug in some speakers or headphones and yeah. Yeah, one thing about synths that I really love is that you have so many different parameters that you can change to alter what the sound of the instrument is. You can introduce noise, you can introduce waving into the sound itself and it just becomes more unstable. And I think when things are more unstable, they have more longevity. You can go back to them more and more and more. I think it kind of changes over time or it does something slightly unexpected or it wobbles and warbles. I'm a big fan of that. It's a little imperfections, isn't it? I mean, it's like any acoustic instrument that's gonna be different every time you pick it up because of the humidity or the temperature. Exactly, or just the way you play it. You know, I'm a guitarist as well. You can play the same thing today as tomorrow and it'll sound slightly different because you're using slightly different intonation, you're bending a string slightly more, or all of those things. So we should just explain the difference between a digital synth and an analog synth because when people see these, they might think, oh, well, surely it's all digital, it's all flashing lights and buttons and stuff, but can you just explain what you mean by digital and analogue in the context of synths? Yeah, so analog synths are controlled through voltages. Digital synths are controlled through zeros and ones. So a digital synth is like a computer. It'll be controlled that way. Analogue synths, the way they're
built, there's slightly more imperfection, I think. Especially if you use an old analogue synth, like kind of made in the 70s or 80s, you'll get wobbles, you'll get imperfections because if the synth is cold, it'll be a different sound if the synth is warm. So you kind of have to let the old ones warm up a little bit. The very first thing that happens is an oscillator makes a noise. So the oscillator is sending out a voltage pulse that goes from, well, let's say from zero to five volts. It can vary, but let's say it's that. How quickly that voltage cycles through going from zero to five is dependent on the pitch. So the higher up the pitch, the faster it cycles through. So basically, analog synths are mechanical in nature. Everything that happens inside them is a thing you can replicate outside of it. You cycle through voltages and then that goes to a filter where you can take off some of the frequencies, but that's also voltage controlled. Can you just demonstrate the oscillator and the filter? Yeah, sure. Just find a very simple oscillator. Let's use this one. This one, so that is an oscillator. So that is a voltage kind of vibrating at a pitch that we can discern as, well, this one is C. Now that will be going through a filter and the point of the filter is to take out some frequencies. The filter that we've got, you can get different types of filter. This filter is a low pass filter, which means that you'll be taking out the higher frequencies. So if we start off with the filter completely open, we can bring down that filter and all of those high frequencies get attenuated out until you've got nothing left. And to be clear, that's as with acoustic instruments. When we hear notes, we perceive notes, is there's lots of different vibrations going on at the same time, right? So if you hear a violin note, the thing that distinguishes the difference between a violin note and a trumpet note or a flute note or whatever is the different combinations of those oscillations, right? The different combination of those waveforms stacking up. Exactly. And what peaks out, basically, if you have white noise... People might think of that as sort of static, right? That you might get on the radio. That's a similar kind of idea. So basically that is all of the frequencies playing together. So that is just every frequency. So if you were to put that into a machine where you could pop out certain frequencies, you could make that into a note quite easily. So if you take that white noise, you can filter it in exactly the same way. That was with all the frequencies in the spectrum that we can hear, but you can do that with just the frequencies that make up notes. The thing about white noise is, I don't know, motorway traffic or crashing waves or any of those things. And actually, it's interesting, because they've done various listening tests over the years where background motorway traffic and background C, people can't tell the difference if they don't know, if they're just listening to them in isolation, because it is just white noise. And that's because of all the combinations of different frequencies
being put out by the cars going across the tarmac and from the base right through to the treble. And then the same with waves. You've got, if you think of how incredibly complicated the sound that's generated by water crashing onto itself is. It's every frequency. So there was a point, I got obsessed with this, there was a point where I made a synth, like in the computer, out of waves crashing, because it's every frequency. You can highlight certain frequencies, you can bring them up and make a note out of it. And then if you put that into a sampler, you can make an entire instrument out of waves crashing, but it won't be discernible as waves crashing, it will be discernible as notes. Yeah, because again, you're finding the frequencies within that complete spectrum. If you have everything, you can choose any frequency. Each synth has sections, so you've got the oscillator, which makes the noise, which goes to the filter. You can shape the noise by cutting out some of the frequencies. And then you've got the envelope section, which is basically, all an envelope is, is it tells the sound how to act over time. It's a long sound like this one. So that's just me hitting the key very quickly once. You can hear that it starts immediately and then it dies out very, very slowly. So you're not holding that down. I'm not holding that, it's just me. Touch the note, touch the white note once and then set your finger away and it's still going on now. So that's got what we call a very long release, which means that it's still going, it's still dying down. Now if I change that and hit the key once, it's very, very short. So you can do any combination of those. And so that's what that section does. So all these synths have those same sections in them. It's just how you can shape the noise is different. Speaking of which, we're going to move over to this incredible construction over here now, because all of the things we were just talking about, this is all of those bits, but not connected together, right? Yeah, so this is a modular synth. The thing about modular synth is it is an open world. It's like a little infinity machine. You can do anything with it. So all these little sections that are in a synth, so the oscillator, the filter, the envelope section, the amplifier, all of those sections within the synths with a keyboard in front of it, they have been routed internally by the manufacturer. They go from one thing to the other thing to the other thing. That's how all of these synths work. With modular synthesis, you have modules, which is why it's called modular. And each module does one particular thing that the keyboard synths do as well, but it's exploded. You can separate them out. You can attach them any way you want. So for people who don't know what a modular synth is, if you've ever
seen a big wall of electronics with cables coming out of it, that's most likely a modular synth. It sort of looks like ground control from NASA or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It looks incredibly complicated. And it is both the most complicated thing I've ever used and also the simplest, because each section does an individual thing and they're all sections within normal synths. It's just that you can break them apart and put them together in whatever way you want. It's like musical Lego. I like to think of it as plumbing. Like it's all plumbing. All these different modules do different things. All I'm doing is finding a path through each module so at the end of it, you get the sound out in the same way that a plumber finds a path through pipes from one part to another part. That's a really good analogy. But another analogy, which actually ties into the history of this stuff, is a telephone exchange, an old telephone exchange. Right, yeah. I mean, until the system's changed over, however many years ago it was, 30 years ago, whatever, I think I'm right in saying that when you called up for a long distance call, you would call an operator who would then patch you through physically with a cable, who would take one cable from there and put it in, patch it over to that one. Right, yeah, I've never thought about that. And so those early telephone exchanges, I mean, there are people who make music specifically using people like Heinbach, who use that sort of equipment, I think, where you're basically connecting the sound from one place to the sound from somewhere else, right? Yeah, right. In that case, it's telephones, and in this case, it's out to the speakers for music. Yeah, exactly. And modular synths came before these other synths. There are some people who think that the worst idea people ever had was to put a keyboard on the front of a modular synth and call it a synthesizer. So. It's a lot of plugs and dials and knobs and buttons, lots of multicoloured cables connecting things together in really complicated ways, flashing lights. But crucially, no keyboard, right? There's no keyboard anywhere. And so that's partly why it looks so crazy, right? And it doesn't look like a musical instrument, necessarily. Yeah, sure, yeah. So there's no keyboard. You can attach a keyboard, because it's an infinity machine, you can do anything, but at its essence, it is just separate sections where you have to tell it what to do in each section. So like I was saying, the voltage control, this is all voltage controlled. So anything that happens is just a voltage being sent out. Either it is what we call CV, which is a control voltage. So like it can pulse from a zero to a five volts, or it can just send out a little pulse of the highest voltage possible. And that's called a gate signal. So this entire thing is run on CV or gate. I can show you what I mean by all of this. If we make a quick patch, if I plug in this thing here is an oscillator, so it will just make
a sound. And that sound, as soon as I plug this in, that sound will just keep going. So that is just what that module does. It outputs a sound. Now I've tuned that to be a C, but it can be anything. So what we can do then is we can feed that through a filter. So the second module that it's going into is a filter, which does that. So if that goes through an amplifier after that... I should say just for the listeners that what you're doing when you say you feed that into a filter, you've taken a wire, in this case a blue wire, out of the oscillator, a wire, physically patched it into a little plug on the filter. And now you're about to take another wire, in this case a red wire. I mean, the colors are just for fun. And now you're about to take that from there into… So the output of this filter is now going through an amplifier. So I'm about to input what we call an LFO, which is a low frequency oscillator. So in the same way that this noise that you can hear is an oscillator vibrating very fast into audio rates, so we can distinguish it as a note, the low frequency oscillator doesn't get into audio rates. It just pulses from a low voltage to a high voltage, and we can't hear it because it's so low, it's so slow. That's because audio rates, so human hearing is between about 20 hertz and about 20,000 hertz, right? And so anything outside of that, we're not going to hear as a note. So a low frequency oscillator might be going at 5, and hertz is cycles per second. So if we're hearing something at 5 hertz, it's 5 cycles a second or it might be any factor of those. Exactly. So this is going to go into an amplifier, which is going to open and close it at a certain rate. So now we get a little pulse. If I was to take that same oscillator, that same low frequency oscillator, the same LFO and put it into the filter. We've now made the filter open and close at a certain rate. Now this is all just one note still. So if that then goes into, let's say we put it into another amplifier, but we send that amplifier gate signals at a rhythm, telling it when to turn on and off. We get... So you can make a little rhythm. And then this top stack is all effects. So if I send this through, if I send that sound, that signal, through a delay, which will repeat the noise that's going into it. So, we're already getting something musical. I can copy that signal, that original signal, and send it into a different effect. This effect is a crazy little kind of glitch effect, which pitches, it takes little sections of what's going into it, and it pitches it up or down an octave or... So, we get... So, this is all one note. I haven't messed with the pitch at all. There are ways of doing that, but this is all we've got, just like one note. The original, yeah, that original oscillator that we heard, the very simple thing is now, yeah, that same oscillator is now just being fed to different things, which is turning it into other notes.
Yeah, so it's just that one initial feed. If I take out that initial feed, it just stops happening. So, basically, if we throw a kick drum on this, you'll have a bit of music. So let me just make sure that I've got this going in the right place. And that's a patch from nothing. It's very cool. It suddenly comes alive, doesn't it? Yeah. You put that, you anchor it with that. A back beat behind it, and it suddenly makes so much sense. So yeah. That's very cool. And those things are all sort of talked to one another, again, through this voltage, and that's how they're kind of synced up, right? Yeah, exactly. So I've got a kind of a master clock, and all that does is send out a tempo. So it's a high voltage. It's like the gate signal I was talking about. It's a high voltage pulse that goes at the moment. It's at 135 beats per minute. So the entire system is then clocked to that one pulse, which is why everything was in time. When I brought in the kick drum, it was in time. Again, because it's an infinity machine, you can have all these things running at different pulses. So you get cross rhythms, or it can just sound like an absolutely awful mess. You know, it's an infinity machine, so it does everything. Talk us through why you might choose to use this over trying to create some of those sounds in a computer. Because it's obviously, it's an amazingly powerful tool. It's an infinity machine, as you say, but it's very complicated. Yeah. And to some extent unpredictable, is that right? It's directionally unpredictable. So I'm a guitarist and a pianist, mainly. And when I sit at those instruments, I am proficient enough. I think this is true of any musician who reaches a degree of proficiency. When you sit at that instrument, you are more in charge than the instrument. So I can sit at the guitar and I can play exactly what I have in my head, and it will come out and it will be the thing. The reason that I love modular synths is that balance of what you're putting in and what you're not putting in but exists, it's shifted a little bit. So you're more of a conductor with a modular synth. You tell it the parameters, the tempo or the key, that sort of thing. You give it the instructions at the beginning, and then you just see where it goes and what comes out of it. Like whenever I make something on it, it's 50% me, 50% the machines. You know, I tell the machines what to do, but the machines come back to me with something surprising every time. So yeah, I use it as like an inspiration tool. I think you could probably make all of these noises in a computer. You know, computers are incredibly powerful. The thing that we just did, for example, I could make that in a computer if you gave me enough time and enough concentration, I can do that. But it would be me making it because I had heard what it did and was trying to replicate it. I don't think that I could sit at a computer and have it just come back at me with that stuff. So it's much more of a kind of collaborative process in a way, isn't
it? It really is. I feel like, like I say, when I sit at an instrument that I'm proficient at, I obviously like the architecture of the instrument itself leads you to play it in certain ways. I think that's true of any instrument. The way, for example, the piano, the way the keys are laid out makes you play a certain way. Say, if the high keys were at the left hand side and the low keys were at the right hand side, piano music would be different. Even though the piano would essentially be giving the same sounds, piano music would be different because we would approach it in a different way. But we would still be in charge of the way that instrument sounds, I think. Whereas with modular synths, I'm less in charge of what's happening. I am a conductor, I am someone giving instructions at the beginning, and then just listening and refining when you hear what's happening. So it really forces you to engage with it in a different way. You're not thinking, I'm going to make this sound and try to get towards it. You're thinking, what about these instructions? What would you do if I gave you these instructions? And then when it comes back, you'd be like, oh, okay, great. Maybe a little bit less of this, maybe a little bit more of that. And you can shepherd it into the sound that does something for you, but not necessarily. Each time you feed the sound through, it's called a patch. I've rarely approached a patch and been like, I'm going to make this sound, and that's the sound that comes out at the end. It's always surprising and therefore just always inspiring. It's the most fun. So I've talked about quite a lot in the show over the episodes of where you can kind of track the path of music technology in line with human expression. In other words, you know, so I talk about shells, right, very simple, very basic, natural instruments that take a bit of human refinement to get them to be able to sound like an instrument. But then that journey of kind of creating those shells and turning them into music and an instrument allows you to have the expression that a shell can give, which is relatively limited. But that is the same process that has gone through over countless generations, thousands, tens of even hundreds of thousands of years to basically create this now where you're like, it's just a different tool of expression. It's a different like, okay, human emotions and human emotional lives are incredibly complicated. And we can convey that in lots of ways, whether it's picking up a shell or a kind of ancient bird bone flute, or whether it's collaborating with electricity, basically. Exactly. And it works on a macro and a micro level. So like you're saying, like the shell itself gets refined and becomes an instrument, but then that instrument shell gets refined and becomes a horn or a flute or whatever. So that's the macro level. But on a micro level, that's exactly what I'm doing with the modular system. Each time I make a patch, you know, I'm refining in order to get more expression and more sound. Now, there are some people who say that, and I hate this attitude of
like, well, it's electronic music. It has no soul. It has so much expression in it that if you are listening to electronic music and it doesn't have any soul or it doesn't have, it doesn't emotionally hit you. The problem isn't with the machines. The problem is either with the person who's making it or the person who's listening to it. If electronic music, if synthesizer music doesn't do anything for you, fine. But to denigrate it as like soulless is wrong headed in my opinion. I completely agree. But also I think there is something, there's something in theater called the Vafrendam's effect, right? Which is, which is where you have deliberately distancing thing. I think it's something that Brecht used to use a lot, a deliberately distancing thing that kind of points out the artificiality of what you're watching. And there's something about, I always often think about that with electronic music, that even if something is inverted commas soulless or sounds like a machine, we live in a machine age so you can make music that engages with the idea of machines. And so I think often when music can create and things, when electronic music started emerging, it kind of came partly from that modernist place of exploring. And I think like when Music Concrete happened, so Stockhausen and all those people, I think that was almost the aim, that Brechtian distancing aim. I feel like we've got past that. We've kind of explored what machines can do. And I feel like we're at an age now, especially, where we're folding that in and trying to use those same machines as tools of human expression. So the electronic music I listen to, and I listen to a lot of electronic music, is some of the most powerfully moving music that I can think of. Because the people who make it have mastered these electronic tools in order to express their emotions, which is all we are all trying to do as musicians all the time. To say that this one tool owned that, that one do the thing, nah, that's just not true. Absolutely. And again, it's just the fact that we're using electricity or ones and zeros, rather than a string vibrating or a column of air vibrating or whatever, it's the same principle. You're just getting something vibrating and then affecting that sound in various ways through... Exactly. And the functionality of these modern synths especially is so high. There's such a degree of personalisation. What you've got is an expressive tool in the same way that a guitarist was to play a piece on guitar and I was to play that same piece on guitar. You'd get nuanced differences depending on what emotion we put into it. These machines are incredibly nuanced. If someone had exactly the same modules as me, they would patch very differently. They would make something entirely different to what I make, not just through taste but through kind of the emotion that we're putting into it and how we're making things work. So it's every bit as an expressive tool as when I sit down at the piano and just play a piano piece. But also, there is an act of creativity in putting the thing together in the first place and thinking, if I have this module, then that will allow me to do this. Because to be clear, each of
these bits, you don't buy a whole system like this, right? You buy each of the little strips. You buy an individual module and it does a specific thing. Some of them do quite a lot, but they basically do a specific thing. So this one outputs noise, this one is a filter, this one is a delay. You know, each thing does a very, very separate thing. So yeah, the way you put it together is kind of an artistic endeavor in itself. If you think of a piano, the piano has one sound. So these synths have presets. This piano has one sound, it has one preset, and that preset is piano sound. We love piano sound, but it's one preset. You know, if you had an acoustic piano and you sat down at it, you know what it's going to sound like. And you can do things like put felt behind it or put things. You know, you can change it. But then that's three different sounds. These synthesizers have hundreds, if not thousands, of different sounds within them. How is that not expressive? I mean, if you think there are what, tens of thousands of modules, probably, that you can buy and then you assemble them into however many different iterations of that. I mean, you're talking... Exactly, the combinations would run into millions. Oh, yeah, definitely. Very, very quickly. Yeah, and that's before you start connecting them all together. Exactly. So each one of these modular setups is like the owner of the modular setups, the musician's fingerprint. You know, these are the things that I've collected over years that make the sort of sounds that I want to make. And, you know, I buy modules, plug them in, play with them for a month and think, ah, that is not me. It just didn't work for me. But these ones, these are the things that I've collected over time that express what I want to express through this instrument. It's amazing. Thanks, man. That's really illuminating. I don't know if you've got time just to do your thing. I would love to. Is that right? I've always got time for that. That would be lovely too. So my thanks once again to the brilliant Jay Chakravorty for that, I think, really interesting interview and demo at the end there. If you like that, there's a lot more on my Patreon, including the full interview with Jay and that brilliant track he made for me at the end there, which is well worth a listen. So head over to originofthepieces.com. But now it is time to talk to some of the creative team behind the stage show of the Oscar-winning film, Spirited Away. Now those of you who don't know Spirited Away or Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's work, I really suggest that you check it out. And I really suggest that you do bear with this interview, even though you may not know the show, you may not know the film. It's available on Netflix, you can watch it right now. Fascinating film, very unusual, and of course with a very iconic score, which is the thing that we of course mainly discuss today. So I talked to
three of the key creatives, as I say. We've got Brad Haak, who did the musical arrangements and musical supervision, sort of interpreting Joe Hisaichi's score for the stage, and Maoko Imai, who is the assistant to the director and the kind of co-conceiver of this show with the director, John Caird. And John is probably best known in the UK for staging large scale musicals and plays, including of course Les Miserables, which he co- directed with Trevor Nunn. So yeah, again, pretty rare that I get a chance to talk to three key creatives behind such a big and fascinating show. So it runs a little bit longer than usual, this interview, but I think you'll agree that it is well worth it. Now I was lucky enough to talk to them in the same room, but that has created a couple of audio issues. So you'll hear the sound changing a little bit over the course of this interview. It's recording four of us plus a live piano, which is not the easiest thing to do on the fly. Still, it is a really interesting interview. I'm sure you'll agree. Over to John, Maoko and Brad just before the show opened. At the end of April. I'm John Caird. I write and direct musicals, operas, plays and what have you. And I'm Brad Haak. I'm the music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator for the upcoming London production, Spirited Away. I'm Maoko Imai, who is a co-adopter and assistant to the director of this show. And just for those people listening who don't know much about the show, can you explain what the show is? It's a theatre adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's famous animated film, Spirited Away. Original Japanese title, Sen Tochihiro no Kami Kakushi, Sen and Chiro's Spirited Away by the Gods. And it's a great movie. It was very, very successful all around the world. It won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2001, I think. And we adapted it for the theatre, starting in Japan three years ago, and it's been running there ever since and is now going to open in the West End. In not just in any West End house either, in quite a big... In the Coliseum Theatre, which is the home of the English National Opera, which is a very big opera house and which we are very happy to be inhabiting. It's enormous, it's about 2,000... About 2,500, yeah, it's one of the biggest theatres in London. It's a huge, huge production. We're talking about the music today. Could you tell me, Brad, about the original composer? Actual birth name now is going to elude me, but he, when he was in college, sort of re-monochored himself as Joe Hisaichi, which was a kind of Japanese sounding version of... Wasn't Oscar Peterson? Jones, right. So, you know, Joe has been referred to as the John Williams of Japan. Much of his fame is derived from his collaborations with Miyazaki and their work together on the Ghibli films. Joe is also a very well respected composer in his own right. He's written wonderful symphonic pieces, all sorts of classical pieces. He's written many film scores for films that have nothing to
do with Studio Ghibli. And he's a wonderful conductor. In fact, right now, he's doing a lot of work with symphonies around the world. So he sort of operates in all those areas. But he's best known and I think it's safe to say most beloved among Japanese people as a composer for those beloved Ghibli films. Yeah. And what was it that drew you guys to adapting the work for the stage? Well, Maoko and I love working in Japan together because it allows us to actually spend some time living there. We have three children and it also means that they can come with us sometimes and spend time there. And so we've done a lot of shows together. But on this occasion, Toho, the production company, asked me to think of a big show that I could do in the Imperial Theatre, which is another 2,000-seat theatre which they own. They're always looking for material for. And I thought after all these shows that have originated in the West, I really ought to do something properly Japanese. And it was shortly after that that it occurred to me that Spirited Away was a possible thing to do. So Maoko and I went to Miyazaki and Suzuki, the producer for Ghibli, and begged to be allowed to do it and were told we could. Was that a hard conversation? No, no, no, no. Really? Surprisingly easy even to see. He said, yeah, it's fine. I don't know what made them say yes. He was presumably aware of your work in the past. I guess somebody must have made him aware of it. We had to go and petition them because Miyazaki had never allowed any of his works to be done for stage until then. He'd always said no. He'd been asked many, many times. I don't know. Maybe just something tipped him over the edge for some reason. He just thought, oh, what the hell? Why shouldn't other people have a go at my work? But we actually went there to talk to Toshio Suzuki, who's become a good friend of ours now. He's the main producer for Ghibli. We weren't expecting to meet Miyazaki, but as the meeting began, Miyazaki walked in wearing his apron. And just sort of settled in. And I think if he hadn't been there, the decision would have been much longer coming. But I think he just liked the way we were describing his work back to him, I think. Then we realized to do this show, we have to use the music. Without Hisaichi-san's music, it's nothing. So we went to see him as well later on. His first reaction was that we shouldn't bother doing it in Japan. Both he and Miyazaki and that whole bunch of Ghibli have a very nuanced, say, relationship with their own country. I mean, there's all sorts of things they don't like about Japan, they don't like about Japanese culture, they don't like about Japanese music. I mean, Hisaichi and Miyazaki, they hate the shamisen sound, you know, that sort of plinkety-plunk instrument that Kabuki uses a lot. Yeah, in the soundtrack of Spirited Away, there's almost no traditional Japanese instruments. You'll hear some Middle Eastern instruments, zezuruna, things like that, that sound, you could say,
sound exotic, but nothing specifically Japanese in the instrumentation. I heard some tabla at one point, did I? It really sounded like tabla. Yeah, he pulls from some Indian traditions, he pulls from a number of Middle Eastern traditions as well, but not a Koto to be found. Right, right. It's interesting that if you look at all of the Ghibli films, some of your listeners might know the Ghibli films well, but an awful lot of them are drawn from Celtic legend or ancient Greek legend, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Italian. As a group of creative people, they tend to think of Europe as their home Genesis place. It's quite typical of that generation. I know because my dad is that generation. Just before the war finished or just after the war finished, these generations were born, tend to hate Japanese-ness because of what happened during the war. I don't know what it is, but my dad was just listening to jazz, American jazz. Much older people think America is an enemy, but that generation is something to adore, which saved Japan from... It's Joe's generation as well. In Joe's case, it actually happened very quickly that he hopped on the bandwagon of this new sound that was created in the 50s, which was this amalgamation of subtle, maybe sometimes not so subtle references to more traditional Japanese sounds in terms of the kinds of scales that they used when they wrote the modes that they were writing in, the shapes of melodies, but unmistakable infusions of jazz harmonies and popular music as well, and even song forms where you're relying on a melody to dictate the shape of a song and the way we think of it in Western music, you know, an AABA form or something along those lines, whereas so much traditional Japanese music, particularly religious music before that, had a much more sort of wandering quality to it. So Joe really is a link between those two things because he finds a way to the Western ear. He writes in form, he writes melodies that have a shape to them, but he also isn't afraid to let his music, he writes in modes that are more traditional into Japanese ear scales, and he's not afraid to let his music have a sort of wandering quality to it. So it really is interesting to hear. He was there at the right place at the right time to hear, ah, you can blend these two things together, and that has sort of been his, his MO for, from what I can tell for most of his career. Can you, can you play something to illustrate that? Yeah, I mean, his, his best known piece, from Spirited Away, probably actually from any of the Studio Ghibli films, the English translation is, is One Summer's Day, and it opens our show, and I think that's a good example. You know, so the first thing you hear in the show are these unmistakable chords that anyone who has seen knows anything about the Ghibli films as soon as they hear these chords that he wrote at the beginning of this, are very well known. I think one of the reasons why Joe's music links so perfectly with Miyazaki's sensibility as a director, Joe loves writing music that is nebulous. It's never happy or sad. It's always something in between, where it is very much about what you want to bring to the music. So it
creates this sort of nostalgic, dreamlike nebulousness to it, which is also what makes the movie ingenious, is that, you know, as John always points out, compared to a Disney film where there's the good guy and the bad guy, and you root for this one and you hate that one, all of his characters are interesting and nuanced, and you never are quite sure whether to believe someone or not. And these chords, I think, encapsulate it, because there are no minor thirds or major thirds in these chords. They're all very open, and they're all based on fifths. These are all fifths, these are all fifths and fourths, and that fifth and fourth based writing winds up sounding very pentatonic, so without getting too detailed, those kinds of sounds, those kinds of intervals to a Japanese ear sound, even if they can't identify what it is they recognize, they hear something in these shapes that feels somehow Japanese to them, but not exactly... Absolutely, and Joe is a huge jazz fan and would have absolutely listened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and so many of their harmonies are based on fifths and extended harmonies, and that's exactly what he's doing here. And then, again, this is a great example, because when this beautiful melody comes in, it really is a combination of two worlds, because you just have this chord that, again, it's not happy or sad, it just sort of is. But the melody is full of repetition and it's totally diatonic. So it's like in one hand, it's this strangely vaguely Japanese sound. In the right hand, it's a melody that we can remember and is actually very Western. So sorry, just to interrupt, is that diatonic means within the scale? Yeah, diatonic means you're not sort of reaching outside of the key or outside of the scale to pull on interesting other pitches. And then it continues from... And then he starts to imply this is our key. So it's a good example of how those two sensibilities can really be melded together. And so much of the score is like that. It really is incumbent on the listener to bring... You have to bring something to it to decide what you want to take out of it. And, you know, as I said, it's the same thing in the movie as well, that you're never told what to believe. You have to let it land on you in the way that it does. It's something we talked about quite a lot on the show, lots of different people over different episodes, about how music has got that ability to... There's this sort of idea that, oh, there's happy music, of course there's sad music, but actually the thing about, especially instrumental music, is it's ambiguous. There's something that I think is unique about music, is that ability to, the way we think of ourselves day to day, is like, oh, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm sad, but actually our moods are way more on a spectrum, the way we kind of live day to day is in the grey area between those extremes, and music seems to be able to tap into that in that way, and the film as well, the Ghibli feel and the sort of sense of nostalgia, but it's also quite, some of it's quite scary, very unsettling some of it, isn't it? I think it's always worth pointing out that in the theatre, one doesn't normally have a constant soundtrack of music accompanying a
play, because certainly in the English literary tradition, the spoken word is musical in itself. I mean, from Shakespeare onwards, there's a sort of musicality to the text, and the accompaniment of music tends to get in the way of that, and even in a musical, sometimes the ear starts longing for a silence, to somehow clean the palace and be able to get ready for the next bit of music. But this play doesn't have the kind of text that has a musicality to it, because nearly everything that's said in the play is naturalistic chat between people, and it's very thin, the dialogue, because Miyazaki's world relies so heavily on pictures, because he's working in an animated discipline. So the images that are created are there as far more important storytelling devices than the language being spoken. And with images, you do need some musical accompaniment to make the images more evocative. But we've found, haven't we, that there are times in the show when you just long for a silence because the music is giving you too saturated a background. And so we have to choose those moments very carefully where suddenly there's quiet and it's just people talking or just dancing or whatever it is that's happening. Yeah, it's interesting that I came across a quote of Joe's where he talked about, he was discussing his approach to writing music for film and working specifically with Miyazaki. And one of the things he said that I thought was so interesting, you know, compared to if you see a movie that John Williams who he's always compared to is composed and his music is wonderful as well. I'm a huge John Williams fan. But in his music, his music tells you what to think about what you're seeing. You know who the good guys, you know who the bad guys, you know whether this is a lot of energy or if they're about to start kissing or whatever it is. And Joe said that when he writes music for any of Miyazaki's films, he's not even writing music to try to describe the inner thinking of the character. He's not even trying to encapsulate the energy of a scene. He said he's trying to write what he thinks Miyazaki's perspective is on what the scene is. So what's wonderful about that is that you're never sort of seeing those moments where as this character looks this way, the music crescendos, it's always just that the music is sort of providing this background energy of what must have been going through the director's mind as we see the story unfolding. And I think that's another way that it allows you to bring so much to it. You're never being told what to think about it. One of the Genesis moments in the preparation of the score, I think, was Miyazaki wrote 10 or 12 beautiful, quite long free verse poems about the characters and about the events of the film that he then gave to Joe as a way of helping to describe to Joe what he thought the music should sound like. And he wasn't asking Joe to set the poems to music. He was just asking Joe to think about those poems and get the feeling of those poems somehow into the music. And Joe said they were incredibly helpful. We've actually taken two or three of those poems and turned them into songs, sort of work songs that happen inside the Yuya, because we needed moments that just give the audience a bit of respite from the headlong speed of the story. So we found those moments by Maoko creating lyrics out of
Miyazaki's poems and we sent them to music. Is there much singing in the show? Very little, very little. It's not to be confused with a musical. Nobody sings about their feelings. Songs are the sort of songs that people would sing if they were real people, just singing to each other. So it's more sort of naturalistic. It's just a naturalistic extension of how people behave in their normal lives. Play the tune that we have Kaonashi dancing to, because that's really an interesting idea. We found one of the most sort of interesting and beloved characters in Spirited Away is the English version is called No Face, but he's Kaonashi and he really is the epitome of what we've been talking about as far as sort of vaguely ominous, the point of his characters. You actually don't know if he's good or bad. It's Chihiro is the first person to figure out how to finally reach him and to offer him a path of positivity in his life. And so Joe had written a theme that you can hear on a lot of Japanese film composers write things called image albums. Before they begin composing for the actual movie itself, in which they sort of start to spin ideas and write pieces of music that they feel they're sort of inspired by the story. And Joe has a wonderful image album of Spirited Away music that if your listeners are fans of the movie or fans of Joe's, it's really worth listening to. And he wrote this piece called Lonely that was supposed to be about Kaonashi. I think on the album it has lyrics, doesn't it? Which we don't use. But this has been really fun because I've actually had a number of people that have seen the show in Japan and know the movie so well who have pointed out, oh, there was a theme in there that I've never heard before. And we use it a lot for Kaonashi. And I toy with it. Sometimes I treat it in a major way. Sometimes it's more minor, what have you. So this wonderful piece, this theme that you don't hear in the movie that Joe wrote for, as inspired by Kaonashi, is called Lonely. And you know, there's such a wonderful chord in here that harkens back a bit to what we were talking about before, where he's, even in a song like this that is more diatonic, like we were talking about, where it is clearly in a key, in this case we set it in D minor, so we know we're in that key. But then Joe finds these wonderful, unexpected pitches that just when you think you feel sort of settled by it. So there's this towards the end of the A section. Really, lots of jazz harmonies, as you were saying earlier. It's all extended harmony, flat nines and sharp 11s. And I love the way he shifts the downbeat of the bass notes, because it gives you an unsettling feeling all the time. It's never right on the downbeat. It's on the second beat of a bar, isn't it? It's so beautiful. The character we're talking about, Kaonashi, English audience, is known as No Face. He's the character with the big white masks and the black features. It's interesting, isn't it, the way Brad is describing the music not having a tonal bass necessarily, and wondering about the keys harmonically and never quite settling anywhere. And I wonder if that is also redolent of loneliness as a theme in the movie. I mean,
there's so much reference in the movie and the story to loneliness. All the characters, in a way, are grappling with the problem of their loneliness, their lack of knowledge about their own identity and who they should really be, who they should really become. And one of the really fun things on this project has been to, you know, have access to Joe's work and to in places where we needed to sort of extend parts of the storytelling or where there are just some parts of the play, it just takes us longer than they can do in the movie to get from one thing to the other. So, you know, I've taken some of the music and adapted things slightly. And this is actually a good example. Just to get it in your head. You know, such an interesting part of the story is that after Chihiro has seen, that's the female, the girl protagonist in the story, after she's seen him behave abominably, including eating everyone, becoming tremendously fat, she still encourages him to come along on the journey that she's on, the things that she needs to accomplish to sort of bring this story to, essentially to save her parents. So, I wanted to take that theme that we have been associating with Kaonashi and to try to give it a slightly different treatment to suggest that maybe it's a new era in Kaonashi's life. But I tried to do it without relying on specifically major or minor chords. So, trying to, I was like, how would Joe maybe write this moment? Because I think this is such a beautiful moment that we see and go, I can still, I can come along and he goes with her. So, I took this that I had been playing and I revoiced it as this. I brought the theme in. So his music is so rich because he's given me, in a sense, permission to play with those extended harmonies and to sort of tease ideas, whether they're good things or bad things. And it's been so much fun to get to do that in the score. When you say he's given you permission, I mean, is that literally, I mean, do you mean permission just because of what's already contained within his work, or do you mean you do actively consult with him? He has heard all the music in the show and has given us his blessing. I mean more in the artistic sense that because his range of writing is so wide, it allowed me to explore those same kinds of sounds. So when I say he's given permission, I just mean that he creates such a wide vocabulary on the show. It makes my job as an arranger really easy. I think Brad's genius is that he's been able to write an incredibly integrated score for the theater piece and make it all sound as if Joe did it originally. I mean, it really does feel like that. You never feel there's an awkward moment that's not Hisaichi-like. It's all integrated so beautifully. As an arranger, I mean, sort of going back to that same thing, the relationship with Joe, I mean, it must feel like quite a high- pressure thing, working and rearranging someone's music who's still alive. There's one thing, doing it for music that's existed, and the composers have died a long time ago, but for someone who's still alive and still writing music, is that intimidating? Yes. In a word. Actually, I think the hardest part about it is that, going back to what we were saying before about how Injus approached
a film score creation, he's less concerned about underscoring a specific moment that this beat in the music lands with this hand going here, or when we see this look in their eyes with the music changes. So what's been hard about a challenge in creating our score, is that we've wanted to pay homage to that. So there are a lot of places in the show where John very smartly said, we are literally just going to play this entire piece of music all the way through. And I'd be like, John, what's happening? He'd be like, nothing, we're just listening to the music. So balancing that on one end with on the other hand, it's a show that modern audiences are coming to see. We have a new sensibility now for how we expect live theater to be. So there are places where I've taken Joe's music, adapted it hopefully as little as necessary to sometimes get it to match beat to beat in the show so that the audience is seeing a theatrical piece that makes sense to them. In other words, if all we do is just play Joe's music entire pieces at a time, you would just eventually feel out of sync and I think it works well for a movie. It would work less well for us. One of the things that characterizes the Ghibli canon of work and makes it very different from the Disney Pixar axis is that those films, the American animated movies, tend to be remorseless, quick time action all the time. It's as if they're nervous about, if they have a single silence, people will switch over to another channel or they'll go to the refrigerator and get themselves a beer and lose concentration. So they're constantly working on gaining your attention all the time. And Miyazaki doesn't do that. He'll give you a frenetic five or six minutes of action and then he'll just hit a total silence inactivity where I think he wants you to think about what you're watching. And he himself wants time to think about what he's drawing. And it really characterizes his work more than almost any other thing in it. Those moments of contemplation and reflectiveness. And those are the moments that give us a marvelous opportunity to just listen to a whole piece of one of Hisaichi's tunes so that we can allow the audience to sit and think while they're listening to beautiful music. I mean, for those of you who are really keen Hisaichi fans and Ghibli fans, I think it's very interesting to compare the score of Spirited Away, which was written nearly 25 years ago now, and the score of Boy in the Heron, which is the latest Miyazaki movie to come out. Because again, Joe's 25 years later is writing in more or less the same style. But his treatment is so spare. He stands away from the film so much. There are so many silences. It's a beautifully observed way of working on a movie that is extremely nuanced and complicated in its storytelling. I'm not going to remember all of it, except for just this part that there's a theme in Boy in the Heron, that the theme is just... us. I mean, it's literally just a perfect fourth, and you're like, is that it? Yes, that is it. And it just, and of course, it always leads to something else, but that's what the thread that sort of really pulls you through the journey of Miyazaki's mind. And it's having the kind of confidence, the musical confidence to do that, and knowing that that collaboration is so tight between the director and the composer is. Again, that's when all the great, I
think all the great movie scores have got that collaboration at their heart, right? And it's interesting, Joe did an interview recently in the Daily Telegraph, which was very instructive because he was asked how much did Miyazaki influence you in your choice of music for Boy in the Heron. And Joe said, not at all. In the old days, we used to sit down for weeks in the studio discussing every moment of the film and what music was going to be in it and what music he didn't like. And now, he just hands over the movie and says, just do your magic, do your stuff. It's like the wonderful story, again, to go back to John Williams again in our comparison, that wonderful story that when he was doing ET with Steven Spielberg, maybe you've heard this before, but that when they were planning the final scene of the movie in which ET sort of makes his way, finally, the boys are riding the bikes and they get him into the forest and his spaceship has come to take him back to his home planet. And Steven Spielberg, before he had written anything, before anything in the script had been written, before any paneling had been done, went to John Williams and said, I want you to write a 12-minute, however long it is, suite of music that encapsulates this part of the story, this final, and John wrote that first. And Steven filmed the entire film to John's music. So it's wonderful. So it's sort of like the film composer has taken their own place. When you go to see Boy in the Harem, you're wanting to hear Joe's perspective on it as well. He's sort of has reached that point where you're going just for that experience of hearing his music, which I think is wonderful. And obviously it's slightly different because it's an adaptation, but you guys have worked together quite a lot before, right? Yes, we have. Is there a similarity there in the sense that when you are spread, Brad, you sort of having worked together a lot in orchestrations and things. Yes, Brad and I have a good language of referring to the work we've already done and the work we're engaged on at that moment. But Brad also is a great dramaturg. Brad has to hold himself back from giving notes to the actors, and sometimes he doesn't hold himself back. But you know, Brad, because we do musicals together a great deal, Brad as a musical director knows that you can't give an actor a musical note, I mean a note about how he or she is singing the music, without involving yourself in that actor's thought process. You know, you can't sing something differently if you're thinking the wrong thing. And so, because Brad also has a dramaturgical intelligence, he's able to know what's... The reason somebody's doing something wrong is because they're not thinking the character right at that moment. You know, everything in that sense is connected. And John is a director because of his musical background, is able to, when he needs to be, to be very specific about, when I've written something that's rubbish, but he can be really specific about what it is in the music that is or isn't working for him, or can mention any number of... There's a point in our production in which he said, you know, with the water slung, it should sort of be Debussy, it should be La Mer, and I listened to that and
incorporated songs like that. So having that specificity from a director who can really, in musical terminology, sometimes explain, well, what if it's this or what if it's that, I think is also a big part of why we, you know, and we're also good at disabusing one another of bad ideas when it's necessary. But I think it's because, Jim, you're incredibly musical, but so are you, Maoko, like you're both, you're trained as a musician first, is that right? Yes, you are. Well, you're a pianist and a violinist and a guitarist and a singer, so, yeah, you do qualify, I think. But I never went to a music college or anything, and so my sisters did both musicians proper and they're educated, so they know that all logical bit of the music, but I don't have any logic behind me, so when they're talking about- You mean theory. Theory, yes. So I don't have it, I just do. And lots of Japanese people are like that, if you're not like classic music background. If you do the western music, they have to learn this, but in anything, not only music, we are not like logical. Like listening to these conversations, really, really interesting because even the Japanese film, Japanese music, they try to analyse and it's fascinating because we don't think like that. That's a massive difference. But in Maoko's case, it's particularly helpful because both on this project and when we've worked on other shows together in which she's been the translator and the adapter of maybe something that was a lyric that was written in English which is now Japanese because of her acting background. Most importantly, if a lyric isn't landing right, it goes beyond just maybe the scansion not being right. She is able to tap into maybe if a singer keeps singing something wrong, she knows that the reason why is because she's not quite saying the right thing for the character. It doesn't feel natural to say that. That perspective makes her a translator very different from others that have worked with it in Japan because she knows what it feels like to have to say something or sing something in front of a lot of people. It's got to feel right and it has to ring true. She has a good meter for when it's not working for whatever performers on stage. Also, singing wise, this vowel is not good for this note. I can't tell because I'm a singer, so you can't prolong that note long because it sounds horrible or sounds not correct. In this case, it's the original Japanese language. So the biggest translation was when we tried to explain John or other English staff what actual Japanese means. That way it was a bigger problem because bringing it back to Japanese is not a problem this time because it's already beautiful Japanese written, but some translation, it's already existed, but it's not quite correct, like neon, so sometimes completely wrong, or just added even, not a necessary word. So we have to explain, the Japanese side has to explain, this is not correct. There's a very good, simple and rather amusing example of that, when we were translating Les Misérables into Japanese. You know the famous phrase in the original Les Misérables is 24601. And if you
translate that directly into Japanese, that's Jean Vangent's prison number, you have to say, 24651, which you can't, it just sounds risible, it sounds ridiculous, and it also ends on an E sound, which you can't sing a top note on. So they had to change the number to 24653, and 3, san, sings beautifully. So Vangent's number in Japan is different from his number in the West. It's really interesting to make it out of the scene. Speaking of shorthands, I feel like the one that I have with Mao, anytime that we're trying to sort of adapt an English lyric into Japanese, and we're trying to figure out how to get the scan, and I'll be at the piano, and I'll play it one way, I'll say, Mao, can we do it like this? And she'll go, no, no, okay, well, can we do it like this? Can we put the... And she'll keep saying no, and she'll go, okay, that's okay. Because it's just, you know, obviously the languages are so different, so musically, and in Spirited Away as well, in places where we've taken, as John said, some of the poetry and tried to set it to lyric, it can be so difficult to get the scanning and the emphasis of important syllables to land on important notes when you don't speak Japanese, which I don't. And the great problem in Japanese, of course, is that the grammar is completely different. In English poetic lyrical language, you're always leading through to an important word on the end of the line. And there's a very strong system of rhyming in English lyrical writing. So you're always heading for the rhyming word at the end of the line, which is where you feel is the proper destination musically, in each case. You simply can't do that in Japanese, partly because they've only got five vowel sounds, a, i, u, e, o, just same as Italian. Which is why you can't rhyme in Italian properly either. But also because in Japanese, you start with the subject of the sentence, then the object, then the verb, and then some unimportant bits of the verb ending. So there is no possible way to end on the important word at the end of a line. But it's a song, it's easier to learn the noun because it's a slightly poetic way I can say. But what's always having difficulty, especially between me and Brad, is in English lyrics, you can have one word in one note, on one note, like short term, but in Japanese it's always, you just say one word, three to four notes you need. So for Brad, it's easy to change the tune for different places. I will go this time, going down, you can't do that, it's exactly the same lyrics, completely different meanings, suddenly change it too. So for English it does work, but please don't do that. Yes, accent is very important, and I just try to adjust my Japanese carefully so that the tone of the accent of that word will land in that strong note. But if you change the melody itself, suddenly it's completely different. Strangely, Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese, but it's an unaccented language. There are no stresses in Japanese, which means that there is extreme subtlety in words having different meanings depending on where the sounds come in the line. And as the Japanese side of this little creative team, how was it bringing it from Japan to the UK?
It's the first time ever. I never imagined this could happen in my life. My Japanese show is coming to the UK. I was quite nervous at the moment. And especially it will be done in Japanese language, and people have to read the subtitle in a very Japanese topic. And even this film is so popular that some generation is completely new to them, I think. So I was really scared and looking forward to see the reaction. I think one thing we can really rely on is something I experienced at Wembley Arena a few months ago. Yoji, our son, and I went to see Joe Hisaichi's concert at Wembley. 12,000 people there, all of them crazy Joe Hisaichi and Ghibli fans, most of them very young. I would say 95% of them non-Japanese speakers, maybe 99% non- Japanese speakers, but completely happy to be present at a Japanese event. Getting to see the show in Japan, you know, because of COVID, when we did our first pass at creating the show, we had to do a lot of it via Zoom, and it was a bit of a crazy process, and I didn't want to come together wonderfully, so all that is to say that it was a few months before I got to see the show for the first time live with a Japanese audience, both because of what the movie is, but I think especially because of Joe's music. People next to me would start weeping at various points during the show. It just meant so much to them to hear this music and to be reminded of it. I came away with two quotes. One audience member who spoke English. We struck up a conversation because they were sitting near me and they loved knowing that I was involved with the show. They were lovely to talk to. I asked them what they liked about Joe's music. I will never forget this quote. She said, she goes, When I hear Joe's music, it reminds me of going to a place I've never been to before. That almost made me cry. How can it remind you of somewhere you've never been before? That's brilliant. It's just brilliant. It's so poetic. The whole piece is so poetic. It's recognizable, but it's different from what I've experienced before. It takes you out of your normal experience. That's it. If we tap into you in a bit of that with our audiences that love the Ghibli films as much here in the UK and hopefully other places as well, them will be in good shape. Amazing. It's sold incredibly well, but there's still some tickets. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Interesting. Thanks once again to John, Brad and Maoko for that amazing in-depth chat about all things Studio Ghibli. As always, if you enjoyed that, the full unedited conversation is on my Patreon. If you go to originofthepieces.com, there's all the links for Patreon in there. You can pay either one or five pounds a month and get access to all sorts of extras, including pretty much all the unedited interviews that I do on this show. Often we go into a lot more detail. If you've particularly enjoyed something and want to learn a bit more, that's a really good place to go. originofthepieces.com and then sign up for the Patreon. You can also
sign up just for free. I put a few extra bits and bobs for free members. Of course, save the extra special goodies for the paid tiers. Anyway, so go over to Patreon if you want to hear more, but thanks once again to John, Brad and Maoko. But now, it's that time where I dip into the genre tombola once again. And a reminder, this is where I take all 1,334 genres that are listed on the Wikipedia music entry, the last of which, by the way, is yodeling. So let's see if we get that one day. And I feed them into a random genre picker, and that picks out a random genre, and that's what I'm gonna look at for next time. So, let me just copy that list over to randomlist.com, slash random picker, paste that in, and drum roll. Corrido, C-O-R-R-I-D-O, Corrido, Corrido. Once again, one I can't pronounce. So that's what I'm gonna be looking at in the next couple of weeks, Corrido, Corrido. So wish me luck with that. And again, if you're new to the show, do go back and listen to some of the others because we've had some really fascinating things recently. We had Ebo Rap from Nigeria on the last episode, episode 14. And before that, we had UK Hardcore. Talked to Frank Turner about that. We had a brilliant session with Nitin Sauny where we were talking about a particular type of flamenco. Yeah, all sorts of stuff. So do go back and check out past episodes. Loads of really interesting genres, loads of really interesting chats. But I think that's about it. Gonna sign off and thanks once again for listening. Please, as always, if you've enjoyed the show, do review it and most importantly of all, share it with other people. Even if that's just word of mouth, that's probably the best way of doing it to be honest. Just tell people that you heard a show that you really enjoyed and they should check it out. Just me doing this really with a little bit of help from some friends sometimes along the way. But yeah, it's a lot of work. It's work that I love doing, but I would love to get more ears on it. So do share and of course, if you're particularly enjoying it and you're able to, do sign up for the Patreon for all the extra in- depth stuff that you can get there. Anyway, meanwhile, thanks again to my guests for this episode. Jay Chakravorty on his Bleepy Bloopy Modular Synths, Brad Haak, John Caird and Maoko Imai for the amazing chat about Spirited Away. I'm gonna be back in two weeks' time. The music is by Hackney Colliery Band, Angelique Kidjo and me. And I'll see you in two weeks' time. Till then, stay musically curious.