Symphonic Suite from Princess Mononoke
Joe Hisaishi completed the music for Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke by summer 1997; its soundtrack was released on July 2, 1997, prior to the film’s July 12 release. According to the composer, he devised the present orchestral suite in 2016 but reconfigured and rearranged it in 2021 to follow the film’s narrative more closely. He recorded the suite in 2021 with the World Dream Orchestra.
Princess Mononoke (1997) was Hisaishi’s sixth collaboration with Hayao Miyazaki, and the first to be theatrically released in the United States. It is perhaps Miyazaki’s most adult film, depicting a conflict between humans and animal gods with a surprising degree of violence and moral ambiguity. An earlier version of the story occurred to Miyazaki in 1980, when he thought to make a version of Beauty and the Beast set in Medieval Japan. The concept went unproduced at the time, but in 1994 he completely reimagined the idea with a gender-swapped prince (Ashitaka) and a wild girl raised by wolves (San, aka Princess Mononoke). The plot, too, was rethought as an original story untied from the French fairytale. The film draws from both fantasy and the Jidaigeki genre of Japanese samurai films.
As with most Studio Ghibli films, Hisaishi began work early in the film’s development, composing an “image album” based on concept art and ideas described by Miyazaki. “For Princess Mononoke, an early word Miyazaki-san mentioned was tension, as in an arrow’s tension,” Hisaishi recalled in a New York Times interview. That led him to compose the title song, elements of which infuse the final score.
The music and media scholar Kyoko Koizumi points out that Hisaishi freely integrates elements of Japanese and Western music in Princess Mononoke, while his previous scores had generally kept them separate. (Kiki’s Delivery Service, for example, being primarily European, and Totoro being more Japanese.) Some of the Princess Mononoke themes combine European and Japanese scales, and while the orchestra is made up of Western instruments, Hisaishi’s use of percussion and flutes evokes timbres of traditional Japanese music.
Hisaishi released the original soundtrack for Princess Mononoke as an album in 1997 and created a Symphonic Suite the following year that he recorded with the Czech Philharmonic. Since then, he has revised the suite twice more, eventually settling on the 2021 version performed on this concert. “I tried to make the composition closer to the story of the movie,” Hisaishi described in his own program note. He put the dramatic climax later in the suite and touched up the orchestration. “As a result, the drama became clearer, and I think we were able to get closer to the world that Mr. Hayao Miyazaki was aiming for.”
The Symphonic Suite unfolds with barely a pause in ten sections. It opens with “The Legend of Ashitaka,” introduced by two strokes of the bass drum that bring us into a mysterious and tumultuous world. In “TA-TA-RI-GAMI (The Demon God),” Ashitaka defeats the boar god Nago, but is struck with a curse. This leads to his banishment from the village in “The Departure,” which lyrically anticipates the main theme song. “Kodamas” introduces the ghostlike tree spirits who bring good luck. The music quivers and rattles with woodblocks and marimba, evoking the sounds of a healthy forest ecosystem. “Shishigami (The Forest Spirit)” is a giant deer god, represented here by a high solo bassoon (a clear nod to the opening of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring), which then gives way to a warlike march.
Next, we come to “Princess Mononoke,” the title song featuring a solo soprano. The words reference “the trembling string of a taut bow,” bringing in Miyazaki’s original suggestion. After the Forest Spirit is decapitated, its deathly alter ego begins to pollute the land. In the film, Hisaishi scored this with eerie synthesizers, but rescores it for strings in the Suite’s “The World of the Dead.” Breathy flutes and piccolo mark Ashitaka and San’s embrace when all seems lost in “The World of the Dead II.” “Adagio of Life and Death” underscores the heroes returning the Forest Spirit’s head. Finally, “Ashitaka and San” introduces solo violin and piano in one of his big melodies, with the singer joining for a bittersweet end.
“In [Princess Mononoke], there is neither a winner nor a loser,” writes Miyazaki biographer Gael Berton. “There is no happy ending with a villain vanquished. The world has suffered, everyone has lost a part of themselves and what they had been fighting for. There is not even a moral lesson—simply the opening of a debate on the relationship between humans and nature.”
Benjamin Pesetsky
Benjamin Pesetsky is a composer and writer. He serves on the staff of the San Francisco Symphony and also contributes program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony.