Department of Music
Saturday, February 22, 2pm
Zoom Lecture and Q&A
Presented by the Japanese Performing Arts Special Interest Group of the Society for Ethnomusicology with sponsorship from the University of Arkansas Department of Music
Click here to register for the live Zoom Lecture
Takahata Isao's 1991 animated film Only Yesterday (Studio Ghibli) is an unconventional coming-of age story about a young Japanese woman from Tokyo, Okajima Taeko, who travels to the countryside to experience the life of a traditional farming family. Throughout the film, Taeko recalls episodes from her childhood when she was a fifth grader. To reinforce the distinction between the two temporal planes, Takahata employs contrasting visual styles between the past and the present. He also inserts popular songs from the late 1960s in the flashback scenes while featuring recordings of Eastern and Southern European folk music during the scenes that take place in the present. In the liner notes to the film's soundtrack album, Takahata describes this technique as a form of "quotation" that provides an added layer of meanings to the film as well as a metaphor for the way human beings interrogate their own pasts to understand themselves in the present. In order to further elaborate on Takahata's statements, analyze key moments from the film to further explore the director's idiosyncratic, yet endlessly fascinating scoring practice.
Kunio Hara is an associate professor of music history at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include Puccini's operas, exoticism and Orientalism in music, nostalgia, and music in postwar Japan. Dr. Hara is the author of the book Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro (2020) as part of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Japan Series that explores the intersection of music and nostalgia in a beloved anime classic by Hayao Miyazaki.
