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 without exception, unforgettable.
And then you watch The Boy and the Heron.
The music is unmistakably Hisaishi. The orchestration is rich, the craft is evident, the emotional intelligence is intact. But the big singable themes are largely absent. The score moves in a different way — through repetition, through accumulation, through rhythmic patterns that build and shift rather than melodies that arrive and stay. For many listeners, it feels harder to hold onto. More abstract. More demanding.
This is not a coincidence, and it is not a decline. It is the result of a musical journey that began long before Hisaishi ever wrote a note for Miyazaki — one that has been unfolding, quietly and deliberately, for over four decades. To understand where his music is now, you need to understand where it started. And it started with minimalism.
What Is Minimalist Music?
Minimalist music emerged in the United States in the 1960s, developed by a small group of composers who were reacting against the complexity and abstraction of the dominant classical avant-garde. Where much post-war concert music had become increasingly difficult — dense with dissonance, hostile to the ear, suspicious of beauty — the minimalists took the opposite direction. They stripped music back to its most fundamental elements: short melodic or rhythmic fragments, repeated and gradually transformed over long stretches of time.
Four composers are most closely associated with the style. La Monte Young (born 1935) explored the sustaining of single tones and the experience of sound as duration. Terry Riley (born 1935) introduced looping and phase shifting, creating music of hypnotic, shifting patterns. Steve Reich (born 1936) developed the technique of phasing — two identical patterns played simultaneously, gradually falling out of sync — and later brought minimalist principles into a rich engagement with world music and jazz. Philip Glass (born 1937) applied minimalist structures to opera and large-scale orchestral writing, bringing the style to the widest possible audience.
What united them was the centrality of repetition — not repetition as laziness or limitation, but repetition as a compositional engine. Small changes accumulate. Patterns shift. The listener’s perception of the music changes even when the music itself is barely changing. Time, in minimalist music, works differently.
The Record That Changed Everything
Joe Hisaishi encountered this music as a young man, and it hit him hard.
The record was Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, released in 1969. Riley had recorded all the parts himself — electric organ, harpsichord, dumbec, tambourine — layering them into a shimmering, continuous texture that felt unlike anything in the classical or popular music of its time. It was ecstatic and meditative at once, hypnotic without being passive, complex without being difficult. For a young composer trying to find his own musical language, it was a revelation.
But the shock of recognition went deeper than aesthetic excitement. Hisaishi had always been drawn to folk and ethnic music — to the rhythmic patterns and modal scales of musical traditions from outside the Western classical mainstream. In an interview from 1987, he described his love of ethnic music in terms that left no room for ambiguity. Minimalism, with its roots in non-Western rhythmic thinking and its rejection of European harmonic convention, felt like a natural home. The two passions — ethnic music and minimalism — turned out to be expressions of the same underlying sensibility.
Before the Melodies: The Composer Nobody Knew
Most people who know Joe Hisaishi’s music know it from the Ghibli films. What is less well known is that by the time Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released in 1984, Hisaishi had already been working as a composer for several years — and the music he had been making sounded nothing like the sweeping themes that would make him famous.
His 1980 album MKWAJU — recorded with a percussion ensemble — is a minimalist work in the fullest sense: interlocking rhythmic patterns, repetition as structure, melody reduced to a secondary role. It draws on the same impulses that drove Riley and Reich, filtered through Hisaishi’s own fascination with non-Western rhythm. There is nothing in it that prepares you for “The Path of the Wind” or “Princess Mononoke’s Theme.” It is the work of a composer building a musical language from first principles, in relative obscurity, for an audience of fellow travellers rather than a mass market.
This is the composer that most of Hisaishi’s admirers have never encountered. And yet it is, in many ways, the most essential version of him — the foundation on which everything else was built.
The Turn Toward the Mainstream — and What It Cost
The invitation to score Nausicaä came, by Hisaishi’s own account, as a direct result of his earlier experimental work. Isao Takahata, who was involved in the project’s early stages, had heard the electronic and minimalist music Hisaishi was making and brought him to Miyazaki’s attention.
But the shift was not simply a matter of opportunity. It was a conscious decision — one Hisaishi has described with unusual clarity. In his 2025 conversation with anatomist Yoro Takeshi, he explains the thinking that led him away from minimalism and toward popular music:
When I encountered minimalist music, I thought: there are still possibilities here, still something to explore. But minimalist music, while artistically valid, has no social demand. In that sense — making music without knowing who it’s for — it wasn’t so different from the contemporary classical music I had moved away from. I came to feel that music ordinary people could actually listen to was far more valuable. And so at a certain point, I decided to become a composer of the city.
Joe Hisaishi, The Brain Is Moved by the Ears (Nō wa mimi de kandō suru), with Yoro Takeshi (Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 2025)
A composer of the city — Hisaishi’s own phrase, a deliberate contrast to the concert hall. In Japanese, machi (街) means the city as it is actually lived in: the shopping arcade, the department store, the television in the living room. Music that reaches people in the spaces of their daily lives, without asking anything of them in return.
The score for Nausicaä was not a simple turn away from minimalism. Hisaishi brought both worlds to the film — minimalist patterns and textures alongside the kind of direct, lyrical writing the story demanded. But when the film was released, it was the melodies that people responded to. It was the melodies that were praised, discussed, remembered. And in hearing that response, Hisaishi arrived at a realisation he had not quite reached before: he was, it turned out, a natural melodist. The gift had always been there. It had simply never been noticed — least of all by himself.
The Melodist the World Discovered
Through the 1980s and 90s, Hisaishi built one of the most successful careers in Japanese music on the strength of that self-awareness. The Ghibli films. The Kitano films. The solo piano albums. The television scores. The commercial work. All of it shaped by the discipline of accessibility — by the commitment to write music that ordinary people could hear and feel and remember.
What the world came to know as the Hisaishi melody — the arching, singable, emotionally irresistible themes that lodged themselves in the memory of an entire generation — was the sound of a composer who had consciously chosen to place the listener at the centre. Music for the shopping arcade, the living room, the everyday. Music that asked nothing of its audience except to be heard.
The Music That Never Left
But minimalism never left him. Even within the constraints of popular and cinematic music, it kept surfacing — quietly, almost invisibly, in the textures beneath the melodies. “Dragon Boy” from Spirited Away is a clear example: a piece that keeps one foot in the accessible world of film music while building its energy through the repetitive, accumulative logic of minimalist composition. It is Hisaishi the melodist and Hisaishi the minimalist occupying the same piece at the same time.
And then, at a certain point — when he had earned the freedom to follow his own instincts, when the conditions were right, when he no longer needed to justify his choices to anyone but himself — he began, gradually and deliberately, to shift his centre of gravity back toward the music he had started with.
There was a specific album where that shift first became clearly audible. It was called Asian X.T.C.
Next: Joe Hisaishi and Minimalism — The Turning Point of Asian X.T.C.