Hayasaka was born in the city of Sendai on the main Japanese island of Honshū. In 1918, Hayasaka and his family moved to Sapporo on the northern island of Hokkaidō. In 1933, Hayasaka and Akira Ifukube organized the New Music League, which held a new music festival the year after.
After the war, Hayasaka continued working on films, quickly winning recognition for his abilities. In 1946, he received the film music award for An Enemy of the People (Minshū no Teki, 1946) at the first annual Mainichi Film Awards.[3] The year after, 1947, Hayasaka received the Mainichi film music award for Teinosuke Kinugasa's Actress (Joyu).
The Film Music Of Akira Kurosawa Download Music
In the late 1940s, Hayasaka invited his friend Akira Ifukube to write film music with him at Toho Studios.[4] Ifukube's first film score for Toho was for Senkichi Taniguchi's Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate) in 1947.[4] Toshirō Mifune, the famous actor who later starred in most of Kurosawa's films, first met Kurosawa at a pre-screening of this movie.[5]
Fumio Hayasaka had a celebrated association with the pre-eminent Japanese director Akira Kurosawa which was short-lived due to Hayasaka's early death. The 1948 film Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) was the first film directed by Akira Kurosawa that Hayasaka composed music for. The director and composer collaborated to test "oppositional handling of music and performance".[3] Their collaboration turned into a very deep artistic relationship, with Hayasaka contributing ideas to the visual part of the film.[7] In his autobiography, Kurosawa would say that working with Hayasaka changed his views on how film music should be used; from then on, he viewed music as "counterpoint" to the image and not just an "accompaniment".[8] This is also the first film that Kurosawa used Toshiro Mifune as an actor.[5]
Among the films Hayasaka scored for Kurosawa are Stray Dog (1949), Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954). During the 1950s, Hayasaka also composed the scores for some of the final works of another Japanese director, Kenji Mizoguchi. Hayasaka composed music for Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and The Crucified Lovers (1954).
Seven Samurai, a Kurosawa jidai-geki film, also features music by Hayasaka. At the time, it was the largest Japanese film production ever.[16] This film featured strong directorial music choices that are closely related to Western symphonic concert music.[17] Masaru Sato assisted with the orchestration of Hayasaka's score.[11] This score utilized the leitmotif, which is a method of compositional organization borrowed from western operas.[18]
Akira Ifukube, influenced by Hayasaka to work with films, scored Toho Studio's Godzilla, sealing his fame as a composer of music for Japanese horror films.[22] This movie was another of a series of postwar films that displayed a Japanese fear of the effects of atomic weapons.[23]
Hayasaka's early musical style was late-Romantic with influences of traditional Japanese music. In the years before his death his style drifted towards atonality and modernism. Keeping with tradition and the demands of film makers, while scoring for films his music was closely related to (and often borrowed from) western orchestral music.
Very little information is available about the production of Song of the Horse but much of the film appears to have been shot in the summer of 1971. The crew was small and included Kurosawa regular Masaru Sato who composed the music, which together with the images plays a central role in the documentary. The film has a distinctive theme tune and there are times when the use of music and sound, or the lack of any, is fairly experimental.
Music in the Western presents essays by film studies scholars and musicologists on core issues in western film scores: their history, their generic conventions, and their ideological import. The essays cover the genre of the western from its generation and development in Hollywood to its international impact from Europe to Asia.
An introduction to the discipline of film music, Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is an overview of the history, theory, and practice of film music. It embraces a global perspective examining film music in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East, as well as the US and western Europe.
James Stewart once said, "For John Ford, there was no need for dialogue. The music said it all." How the West Was Sung is a comprehensive analysis of the music in Ford's iconic westerns. Employing a variety of critical approaches and incorporating original archival research, the book explores the director's oft-noted predilection for American folk song, hymnody, and period music.
Settling the Score situates the music that developed to accompany Hollywood films of the studio era in historical, institutional, cultural, musical, and theoretical contexts and examines the conventions and strategies underpinning the classical Hollywood model, the most powerful and influential relationship to have developed between music and film.
Sean: I viewed them mostly as a unit so that the differentiation musically was really to emphasize the bad guys chasing them. The gangsters got the taiko drums, piano with bass clarinet and shakuhachi, while Sue and Frenchie had their heavy tremolo guitar and groovy Rhodes sound.
Sean: During the lockdown I considered having musicians record remotely, but in the end, I just waited until they could record in person. I need to be in the room with them to get the performances I want. I am sure things will get back to normal soon enough.
Cody Matthew Johnson is a multi-media composer, music producer, sound designer, and multi-instrumentalist that has worked across music, games, movies and more. Trek To Yomi launches on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series XS, and Xbox One on May 5, 2022.
About Kurosawa's use of music. With a few major exceptions, I generally have a severe, unchanging dislike of the way Kurosawa used music in his films. (This is my opinion, duh. It doesn't subtract too much from my passion for his films, double-duh.) In this instance, I can hear him telling his composer (the great Fumio Hayasaka, eight scores with AK before his death in 1955) to "give him something along the lines of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" ... and perhaps poor Hayasaka-san came back with something more or less original and Kurosawa might have said, "no, no -- make it sound more like the Grieg" ... and this is what we get. It's awful. And it never stops. My sole criticism remains equally severe throughout this film. There are moments where Hayasaka's own music comes soaring through and it is beautiful. But if you are not completely sick of this Grieg by the end of the film, you're a better (or perhaps calmer) human being than I am...
The shot of Taeko Nasu's photograph, with Akama and Kameda's images reflected in the window, left and right of the photo, is gorgeous -- and the [Russian] music here is actually perfectly suited to the scene --
Intertitle V informs us that Ayako is like her mother -- strong-willed and sometimes "mean." The piano music is a close copy of the "promenade" interludes from Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition."
Hara's entrance is magnificent. The doorbell buzzes and Kameda goes to answer it. He looks at her; music; she's brushing off her coat, she looks up at him -- AXIAL CUT, close -- she turns around to see if he is staring at someone behind her perhaps -- another axial cut and she asks him to announce her. He turns to leave, but she can't imagine how he knows her name.
When Kayama slaps Kameda, the music swells and as Mori squeezes out a tear, one cannot help but feel that this is meant to be a "Christ-like" depiction. He forgives Kayama; he tells Taeko Nasu that he thinks of her as a pure virgin and she invites him to her birthday party tomorrow.
That film historians have only recently begun to recognize film not as a uniquely visual art but as a highly integrated one, one that unites the previously separate mediums of image, sound, and music, stems no doubt from a peculiarity rooted in the beginnings of film history itself. For nearly the first three decades, film was not a fully mechanized art; instead it relied on a strange simultaneity of technically disparate parts, merging mechanically reproduced moving images with live performances of music and sound. Unfortunately, this mix of real and reproduced media led instantly to a critical inequity. Because it was mechanized and represented a new technology, the visual part of the film came immediately to define the film proper. Then as now, film was prized primarily as a visual technology or art.
The history of silent film music is important not only because it challenges this visual-centric model of film, but also because it offers a new and deeper understanding of the term silent. Certainly, if film had been truly silent from the beginning, this section would not exist. If the following documents reveal anything, it is the irony of the most common term used to refer to early film. For in fact, the "silent" period was full of sounds-noise, music, even dialogue and narration. In qualifying the silence of early film, therefore, the documents in this section redefine that silence not as a lack of sound, but as a lack of integration. The undoing of film's silence, in other words, will come not with the inclusion of music and sound, but with their mechanization, the technological innovation that allowed music to be represented alongside the images.
The history conveyed by these documents of music in the silent period also challenges the assumption that the sound of film music was standardized or "classicized" by Hollywood composers of the 1930s and 1940s. Far from being the beginning of a classical tradition of wall-to-wall orchestral music, Max Steiner's "Golden Age" scoring model was, rather, the culmination of three decades of silent film music experimentation. 2ff7e9595c
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