Author: Yasuda Joe

The Hidden Theme Ask anyone to name the music of My Neighbour Totoro, and they will almost certainly sing the same melody. The opening theme — cheerful, instantly recognisable, impossible to forget — has become one of the most beloved pieces of music in Japanese cinema. It is the sound of childhood, of summer, of…

The Composer of the City, Revisited In the previous essay in this series, we traced the arc of Joe Hisaishi’s early career — from his beginnings as a minimalist composer working in relative obscurity, through the discovery of Terry Riley and the revelation of A Rainbow in Curved Air, to the conscious decision to become…

Something Has Changed If you grew up with the Studio Ghibli films of the 1980s and 90s, you know what Joe Hisaishi sounds like. You know the sweeping waltz of Howl’s Moving Castle, the playful bounce of My Neighbour Totoro, the aching lyricism of Princess Mononoke. You know the melodies — because they are, almost…

Album: World Dream Orchestra A Conductor in Waiting For much of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, when Joe Hisaishi performed with an orchestra, he did not stand on the podium. He sat at the piano. The conducting was entrusted to Kim Hong-jae — a Korean-born conductor based in Japan with whom Hisaishi had…

Album: ETUDE ~a Wish to the Moon~ The Success That Left Him Unsatisfied In the early 2000s, Japan was in the grip of what became known as the iyashi boom — a wave of popular interest in music that soothed, that calmed, that offered a kind of emotional shelter from the noise of everyday life.…

Why This Blog Exists If you have attended one of Joe Hisaishi’s concerts in Europe over the past few years, you already know something is happening. The venues are getting bigger. The audiences are getting louder. And the programmes, depending on which evening you chose, may have surprised you in ways you did not expect.…

Album: Freedom – Piano Stories IV – A Television in Hawaii Joe Hisaishi had just finished composing Howl’s Moving Castle. He was on holiday in Hawaii — the kind of complete break that only makes sense after the sustained intensity of a Miyazaki collaboration — when he turned on the television and saw something that…

The Theme That Almost Never Existed The most beloved piece of music Joe Hisaishi ever wrote for a Studio Ghibli film was not part of the original plan. “The Merry-Go-Round of Life” — the waltz that opens Howl’s Moving Castle, returns throughout it, and has since become one of the most recognisable themes in animation…