2023 International Women’s Month (7):

The Greatest Film Score composer you’ve never heard of

Screen Shot from “Mezame,” youtube

As a kid, I didn’t take movie scores very seriously. I assumed they were like elevator music. You know, just in the background, meant to set a mood but mainly to be ignored. But there is a lot of music in film and TV scores. I just had to learn to listen.

A good movie score tells a story, taps into our emotions, and impacts how we remember the movie itself. A great score becomes a character in the story. Think of Ennio Morricone’s scores for “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” or the themes from “The Godfather” and “James Bond.”

You can meet someone from another country who doesn’t speak your language, but you play them the first bars of any of those themes, and chances are they’ll immediately be able to name the movie. They may even start doing impressions of the main characters!

Yuki Kajiura was born in Japan but was largely raised in Germany. She was immersed in classical music and learned to play the piano as a child. Much of her work has been informed by this training, and she composes most of her work initially on the piano.

Kajiura has composed the musical scores for over twenty-five full-length movies, over thirty Japanese TV series, and theme songs for at least a dozen commercially successful video game franchises. She has been called the “Ennio Morricone of Japan,” but she does more than compose scores. She is a major record producer and impresario who has organized several successful recording groups and produced their albums. She also produces records for other groups. She is an accomplished instrumentalist herself and plays piano/keyboards in live performances of her work.

Kajiura’s style is unabashedly sentimental. She does not hesitate to use hooks that manipulate our feelings but is not repetitive or trite. Her best work feels haunting, as though you’ve heard it before, and yet sounds fresh and new. In this regard, she is like Morricone, whose scores are original yet full of irresistible hooks and a sense of nostalgia. Like Morricone and other great writers of movie scores, she has a talent for composing earworms (thinking of you Steve Goldberg!)

Kajiura has organized several stand-alone vocal groups, including Kalafina and FictionJunction. The latter is an ensemble of four female vocalists accompanied by Kajiura herself and five additional instrumentalists who have worked with her for over a decade. FJ performed the vocal lines for many of Kajiura’s film scores. Their hallmark is the pure, luminous quality of their individual voices and the richness of their harmonies.

The closest Western comparison I can make is to the Irish group Celtic Woman. Like Celtic Woman, FJ are a bit of a supergroup, with most of the vocalists already having had significant careers prior to this. There have been seven all-told who have rotated in and out of the lineup, with Keiko Kubota (contralto) and Kaori Oda (mezzo) being the constants.

In 2020, Kajiura brought FictionJunction together for a series of studio/live (ie., one-take) recordings of some of their best-known themes. These were done pandemic-style, without the big orchestras and post-production work that went into the original soundtracks. No cutting and splicing, no re-takes, no artificial effects. It’s just the four vocalists and the band, with Kajiura on piano. These recordings reveal the power of the women’s voices and the richness of their harmonies, free of the orchestral background.

This is a long clip but all of the songs are timestamped in case you want to sample particular ones. Two of my favorites are “Mezame” and “Key of the Twilight”. Listening to the entire thing is worthwhile—I find it an immersion in wonder and beauty.

Yuki Kajiura composer, piano

Vocalists (in order of their usual position on stage): Joelle (Soprano); Yuriko Kaida (Soprano); Keiko Kubota (Contralto); Kaori Oda (Mezzo Soprano)

Instrumentalists: Hitoshi Konno (violin); Koichi Korenaga (guitars); Kyoichi Sato (drums); Tomoharu “Jr” Takahashi (bass guitar); Yoshio Ohira (percussion and sound engineer)

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Sources:

“The woman who took “Sword Art Online” to the next level”, 2022 https://gamerant.com/yuki-kajiura-spotlight/

Discogs pages for FictionJunction, Yuki Kajiura

Anime News Network https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=3914

Yuki Kajiura official site

https://fictionjunction.com/

Wikipedia pages for Kajiura, FictionJunction