JOE HISAISHI

Basically all his Miyazaki scores - Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Mononoke you have, Spirited Away. I couldn't get through the whole Howl's Moving Castle album and I haven't heard neither Ponyo nor The Wind Rises.

Welcome to Dongmakgol has a brilliant theme, his scores for Kitano are a more acquired taste, but do feature some brilliance - there is a compilation, I haven't heard yet, but I did like The Kids Return quite a lot

From that collaboration, Kikujiro is one of Hisaishi's most popular and beautiful scores, heavily recommended. That's a must-have if there is one.

Departures (Okuribito) isi also quite something.

Speaking of which -- have you heard that Miyazaki recently announced that he's retiring from feature films? I know, he's said it before, but this time it seems final. Sad news.

What's the difference between genius and exceptionally talented?

I recommend Porco Rosso to everyone! This is the best music I think to describe the world of Miyazaki and Hisaishi. The movie is also very much what Miyazaki does (or likes).

How do you sit down at a desk with a piece of manuscript paper and come up with "The Ecstasy of Gold" or "Man with a Harmonica"? That just blows my mind.

One of definitions of genius I read, by the 19th/20th century psychologist and philosopher William James, says that basically a genius is nobody else than a person who has a different kind of interpretating sensual phenomena. Because of that he sees the world (perceives, that would be more precise) differently, because it's not as much as what you get, but what you do with the information that goes into your brain.

There is indeed a question of understanding the world around us, creating our own reality and so on.... Pretty much it's a hugely philosophical thing to delve on. Morricone is a genius. I think John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith are geniuses because of their uncanny and instinctive understanding of the work they do (the fact that Goldsmith was such a great film composer, not just composer, and he didn't want to think of what he writes, being purely instinctive and reacting very quickly to a movie like Chinatown, is to me a proof of him being a genius). That's the only names I will mention, because some of my ideas will be controversial and off-topic for this thread, but I think I could make at least one more case and have arguments for it, but yeah...

The inherent understanding of the medium and being able to deliver what's necessary (and more) for a movie while retaining enthusiasm for the work... that's what I'd call genius in film music.

The Romantics thought of a genius as an artist who would not play by the rules but create his own and so break new ground for lesser artists (German: Epigonen) to follow him.

This would mean that within a given set of rules there can be no ingenious art. So what about a lyricist who wirtes a sonnet? That period was obsessed with the idea of "originality". Traces of that concept are still present in today's concepts of art.

Anyway, from that point of view film music would never qualify as being ingenious because it is programme music, not absolute music that exists for its own sake entirely.

Volker

Me, too!

To those who don't understand, I'll give a little explanation.

The idea behind Romanticism is that all art is original and comes from the personal genius. Sure, great. That means that they can't quote anyone, it just comes from the heart or, preferably even, some kind of a divine intervention. The fact that Romanticism does owe quite a bit to Shakespeare at times is irrelevant in the matter. At least for them. The "originality of art" argument prevailed in art until some time in the 1960s when postmodernism appeared and the fact that you could name the rip-offs (ironically a lot of that came from the positivist - late 19th century - philosophy, which though judged these rip-offs as affecting the level of the analysed work, in simple terms - if, say - and I'm just inventing something here, not referring to particular research - John Milton quoted Horace in Paradise Lost, it would simply mean that Paradise Lost is not a masterpiece, but a lesser, unoriginal work). This was rebuffed by the postmodernist, when the theory called intertextuality (reworked for multiple criticism theories, not just only for literature) appeared when the discovery that a text can be in dialogue with a text that was written before was almost a revolution in criticism.

For a Renaissance poet, this revolution would just be regarded as something totally stupid, because they knew that not only being in dialogue, but openly referring especially the classics (here, by classics I mean ancient Greece and Rome) was THE mode of operation. There were two basic theories, or rather approaches, to this. One, called imitatio (imitation, how ironic it is that today it's regarded as a derogatory term!) meant simply quoting, sometimes indirectly, but still obviously for those in the know (ie. every single intellectual who could read and went through basic education), the works of the classical masters. The other way to go, and it was preferred, was aemulatio (emulation), which meant a competition with what was written before. A classic example of emulation in ancient literature was Virgil's Aeneid, which combined both Homer epics (Iliad and Odyssey) into one work that was, at his time, regarded as better than the originals, by his peers (sadly, I didn't read about any reaction to the poem by contemporary Greeks). And again, it wasn't just about writing an original work of art, but taking something classic and trying to better it. This theory of art has prevailed for the whole pre-Romantic period, with aesthetics becoming a speculative branch of philosophy some time in the 18th century when the theory of Sublime and the theory of Taste have started to appear.

It's preferable to give an unverifiable source credit for your own work?

I hear it looks most fetching in Sanskrit.

I'll just add that it wasn't the only example of such accusations. In fact, a lot of Romantic works, while featuring lots of supernatural elements (devils flying over the stage and so on), were censored by the Church, for example.

Sounds great! Thanks for the review, Jon. I'll have to look into this score.