A Novice’s Studies of Joe Hisaishi, a Story of a Troubled Child, and the Song Born Afterwards (Home for Somebody Else)

Among composers I admire for their style, I can praise few as well as I can praise Joe Hisaishi, a man you probably best know from his works on Studio Ghibli films!

For me anyways, he’s always had a very particular style of capturing the emotion and heart of any scene with any piece, and as someone with a similar goal in their music, he’s someone I’ve turned to a lot for inspiration.

I’m nowhere near qualified to give a full lecture here or anything! After all, I’m still just a novice messing about with what sounds right.

But in December last year, I decided to give a shot at producing a song more influenced by him than ever before.

Looking at One Summer’s Day

One of Hisaishi’s most well-renowned tracks and a song I have a personal connection to- well, in a vague sense!

As a requirement for my university’s Music Production applications, all of us candidates were asked to audition with a musical performance, and I settled on One Summer’s Day on solo piano, out of both my love for it, and my ability to simplify the song into a version I could play, but that still kept the heart of the original!

It wasn’t all that good of a cover—I’m gonna be real with you, I flubbed some notes around the middle of the song, but I guess it’s a different skill to carry on and play these off as a part of the performance \(//∇//)\

What this did help me with more, though, was giving me my first chance to explore Hisaishi’s music physically, and little would I expect that, quite a while later, this would come in handy again.

So first of all- I want to credit the people who I learned more specific theory from!

I watched all of these videos multiple times to pick up on what I could, and I believe they summarise the theory far better than I could—so:

These are the Hisaishi-centric ones, and these were my beginner / intermediate-level introductions to the intricacies of his music. I did learn a lot more later down the line, but after reviewing these over a month, I felt as if I could manage… something.

I can’t emphasise this enough—if you’re somebody passionate about studying Joe Hisaishi, then I highly recommend paying the videos above a view and using them as your introductions to this topic! Gavin Leeper is probably the best teacher among them when it comes to Japanese music theory, but if you’re looking for more general and digestible content, then Nahre Sol and Charles Cornell will have you covered!

Moving on, however, we come to the song I cobbled together in light of all this…

Life as a Vassal

To set the stage for this song, I want to share with you a scenario.

Imagine being born as the only daughter to one of the wealthiest families within your country.

This nation, boasting a culture that emphasises harmony and prosperity over individuality, places great value in those who dedicate themselves to serving society and family, but leaves little room for anybody who may not fit this ideal.

You, as this only child, are poised for only one role in life: to take over your family’s business holdings the moment you are eligible.

Your mother sees her only purpose in life as grooming you for this calling. Every minute you spend with her is akin to a conversation with your boss, with very minimal emotional bonding thrown your way as you spend your time in a lavish mansion all alone.

At school, your wealthy background becomes a disservice to your social life. Your peers tremble at your name and that of your family, and those who do try to befriend you do so for no reason other than bragging rights. It doesn’t help that your poor family life has already left you clueless as to how a child your age should be interacting with others.

Your only ray of hope is your father: a man who grew up under very similar circumstances, but has willed himself to break the generational trauma by being as humble yet caring of a parent as he can. While your mother is busy attending board meetings, appearing on television, and flying abroad, your father sits with you for dinner and chats with you about your school life, your studies, and your plans for the coming Sunday. He even takes you halfway across the country to a vacation home in a quiet village, and relaxing here with him becomes a part of your routine every summer break.

But just one responsible adult is not enough.

Your father alone cannot quell the feelings that your life is being wasted away in blind servitude to somebody else.

You know exactly what your future will look like.

High school is coming to a close, and you have had no say in your prospects moving into university.

Back at home, your mother flip-flops between first cheering in excitement at your inevitable entrance into the world of commerce, before then admonishing you for your appearance, your presentation, your academics, your few friends, your hobbies, your diet, your schedule, your organisation…

How much more could you take before you decide to abuse your available resources to get out of this mess?

The (Fictional) Story of Sakiyo

This scenario above is the backstory of Sakiyomazu Nazakano, or simply Sakiyo as she goes by: the deuteragonist of my now-previous two books!

What happens with her afterwards is long, but to summarise what she did do, she resorted to faking her death and fleeing to a neighbouring country, where she took advantage of her family connections and wealth to make sure she could start a new life alone and undetected.

Things were fine that way for a while, until one day in the year 2283, almost five years after her escape from her home country of Sarozanka, when a mysterious figure emerged in her new town of Niraveth, one who piqued her interest enough that she called them in to learn about their circumstances.

Soon, Sakiyo learns that this figure is none other than Ennarin, who has also forgotten their own background, aside from a strong suspicion that they are not human in nature.

Ennarin believes that meeting with a god, known in this world as a Prince, would help them remember what they actually are, and Sakiyo is again interested, taking the opportunity to meet a Prince for her own studies.

~an early conversation between Ennarin (POV) and Sakiyo~

With the same goal, Ennarin and Sakiyo set off for the City of Aravythrin to meet Adaire, the Prince of Rationale, from whom they learn that Ennarin was indeed a former Prince themselves, prior to their expulsion from the Synod at the start of the year, which further erased all of their memories.

This begins Ennarin’s goal of tracking down the other 10 Princes to piece together their past and their place in this world, with Sakiyo joining them out of her own desires to learn more about the Princes, about Ennarin, and about who she wants to be.

It’s not until much later that Ennarin themselves learns of Sakiyo’s past, only coming about after the two were forced to enter Sarozanka to meet with one of the Princes.

With all of her unresolved traumas, guilt, and bitterness boiling together, Sakiyo gets caught by her mother when she tries to drop off an innocuous gift at her childhood home, and all of this comes to a sudden head.

Just before that though, she writes down an entry in her diary:

9th of Dairan, Sunday, 2283

Everything about Tsuzugo feels the same as I last saw it. It’s home, but for somebody else now, and even then, Ennarin will probably want to spend some time here. Don’t blame them, at least I’m somewhat used to laying low.

Walking down these streets after five years is like some muted testament to the government and people of Sarozanka: not a spot out of place, not a person out of line, just as robotic as the environment I was raised in. Journalists abroad touted Premier Miura as a visionary and a reformer, but first impressions are just more and more of the same of what I ran away from.

It’s still the early evening as I write this, so perhaps there may be time to drop this package off at my old home, but whether or not she receives it, I don’t particularly care.

I don’t care… that’s what I write here, but if I really didn’t, would I be mentioning it at all?

Everything from the city to this bench feels like a sweaty, unhygienic old man forcing me by the shoulders and locking me in, and I hate that. Like the atmosphere of this city has lodged itself somewhere in me to keep haunting me no matter how far I travel.

But maybe that’s why I still feel so relaxed here.

I haven’t told Ennarin yet how hard it is to find someone like them that would spend so much time with someone so different from them. Even my neighbours at Niraveth still see me as just that “silent foreign academic girl”.

Yet here, almost everyone seems like me, or rather, how she wanted me to be before I left.

Another cog in a collective resigned to the endless grinding of some invisible, emotionless machine.

– Sakiyo Naozami (Nazakano Sakiyo)

From Story to Song

Now first of all, I hope that little glimpse into my writing was interesting, at a minimum~! It’s been a while since I’ve shared much of that ( ・∇・)

But also… translating any of that into music is easier than done, to say the least.

All I knew was that the background suited the kind of emotional mood that a lot of Ghibli soundtracks in general have, so where could I actually go from there?

One of the core lessons I learned from Hisaishi’s style was to introduce varied dynamics and timings to solo piano parts, and from here, I worked out a fairly-nice intro on a pentatonic scale known as the Min-yō scale, which, in B Major, encompassed the five notes of B – D – E – G – A

Here’s the interesting part—I could not, for the life of me, find any reliable information on this scale for a while!

I forgot where I first learned about it, but I saw an example in C Major, thought it sounded nice, and transposed it up to B Major by noting the intervals between the notes, and I just… left it at that.

It wasn’t until just this week that I finally found something to back me up.

Enter Kawase Akihiro—a researcher who published a paper in 2013 of Japanese folk scales!

I actually have the full citation here if you’re interested in checking this out, which I do recommend! Kawase details a lot of information on Japanese folk music which is otherwise very difficult to read about outside this sphere!

Kawase, A. (2013). Construction and verification of the scale detection method for traditional Japanese music. International Journal of Affective Engineering, 12(2), 309–315. https://doi.org/10.5057/ijae.12.309

It’s subtle, but on Page 2 of the paper, Kawase notes several tetrachords first conceived by Koizumi Fumio, one of which happens to be the Min-yō (民謡) Tetrachord!

The intervals noted match up perfectly with what I’ve used—the first two notes form a Minor 3rd, the next two notes form a Major 2nd, and the first and last notes form a Perfect 4th.

4ths.

That was another thing I learned from Hisaishi—4ths are severely underrated for emotion and uncertainty!

You can hear that all across the first 2 and a half minutes or so of this song, where, for most chords, I just left out the fifth one way or another to create this more ambitious, floaty feel to the piano!

To the best of my memory, the chord progression at the full extent of this first section, before it slows and quiets down, is as follows:

Dsus2 - Bsus4 - Gsus2 - Dsus2

It’s here where the song veers into a whole different direction, however.

A Dance with Ambience

Ocean waves, boat horns, city traffic, footsteps, metro trains, and phone rings.

For just about the next minute or so, this is what we’re greeted with, and as somebody who’s always advertised herself as an ambient musician, this was really the first time I tried leaning into that label more!

It doesn’t last for awfully-long, as we shift back afterwards into a closing section in G# Minor that concludes the song after some more build up, and this mainly just follows what I’d previously established with the intro section.

All that remains for me to point out are the bells!

As something of a reoccurring sound in my music, the chimes in this song, and like many others, follow just simple quarter notes that loop for as long as they’re needed:

B-B-Ab-Gb-B-Db-Ab

It’s something I personally call the “chime melody”: something not too intrusive that accentuates a song as a part of its harmony that borders on being a rhythmic aspect too.

Once that wraps up, we jump back into the ambience of the Sarozankan Port City of Tsuzugo, where Sakiyo was born and raised, as we get a glimpse of what her teenage years resembled.

Taking the train alone in a crowded metro, all the while ignoring the incessant phone calls from a mother whom she knew never cared for much than to use her.

Why would she answer that? Just like with the first ambient section, Sakiyo just hangs up the call after letting it ring for a while, already anticipating a scolding regardless of what she does.

Departing Tsuzugo

I wouldn’t say at all that Home for Somebody Else captures any sort of a dreary, hopeless mood, but for me anyways, it does manage to lean in to a bit of a nostalgic feel, at least thanks to what I’d learned from the likes of Joe Hisaishi!

It was December 8th of last year when I finished this song, just two days after I’d begun—to put that in perspective, Wayfarers of Snowfall, the last song I’d finished before then, was accomplished over a month before that!

If you remember previous posts of mine too, December 8th was merely three days before I took off for Singapore in my first foreign trip in quite some time!

So you may be wondering: with this renewed motivation from finishing Home for Somebody Else, was I fuelled enough to try and work on a song while I was abroad? To try and capture a new feeling in my music straight out of the new environment I was in?

Hehe… Stay tuned for my answer to that, if you’d so please~!

I know this post has been one of my longest thus far, but there’s simply so much I’d love to share that it can be a bit difficult condensing down some of these summarise, so rest assured at least: once the dust has settled and I’ve gotten some of these set-up posts out of the way, I’ll be able to focus a bit more on specific works, PLUS branch out to comment on some media I’ve gotten lost in during this time!

Sincerest thanks to you if you’ve read this far! (((o(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)o)))♡

And ‘til I finish up my next piece, all the more love to ‘ya~!