Classical Composer Reviews ANIME Soundtracks

0:00 what's up guys so the other day i was listening to the soundtrack to an anime called konoto tomare which for those of you who don't know is about an underdog high school koto club challenging the odds and trying to make it to the national competition think basically any sports anime you've ever seen and then just replace the sport with a traditional japanese string instrument and while i was sitting there marveling at the beauty of the soundtrack i was curious to see if anyone had done a review video for it or if anyone had ever done a soundtrack review video at all so i got online typed it into the youtube search bar and found nothing nothing whatsoever bigger annie tubers

0:45 like giggik the anime man and the kanapa effect all have videos outlining the importance of music and composers in anime and they do a great job at giving a kind of overview of what makes an ost more than just blips and bloops in the background but no one had really done more than a single video for their channel and that's not to say that there aren't ost reviews online i did manage to find one or two blogs that are still somewhat actively reviewing anime osts but times are changing and people don't really want to read a whole blog post about what makes a soundtrack work in an anime they just want to watch a video about it and i figured well [ __ ] it i can do it myself and here we are quick note about me i am a classically trained composer i went to

1:30 contemporary art school up here in canada listened to a lot of weird noise for about four years and at the end of it all i got a piece of paper that says congrats you're probably not going to have a job for a while but jokes aside i've been playing the piano since i was about three or four years old and now i write music for orchestral ensembles and while i do have this background with composition people seem to mistake that for being a proficient musician as well something of which i very much am not and to add to that while i do have a fairly good grasp of music theory and theory analysis

2:16 i personally don't really find those things entertaining or fun at all at least not as something that i would do myself and to be honest i'm kind of mediocre at it so i think i'll leave those things to the experts like 8-bit music theory by the way you should check him out he's fantastic and now with that out of the way let's get to that good weeb [ __ ] since i mentioned it in the beginning of the video i want to start off with some music from kono tomorre composed by haneoka k who wrote the music for hanamo nogatari and orimono atari as well as everyone's recent favorite kaguyasama love is war given that the show is about a music club of sorts you'd assume the soundtrack would have to be one of the strongest parts of the show

3:03 especially since it's such a nice genre of music and as far as this show is concerned you'd be correct though that isn't necessarily always the case with music-oriented anime looking at you kaon now i'm a sucker for a good orchestral ensemble or really any large ensemble that's been well arranged and written for the emotional arrangements heavily relying on orchestral string and woodwind instruments gives the anime a romantic aura reflecting the characters changing relationships as they grow to rely upon each other as the story progresses the piano accompaniment is used to reflect a sort of nostalgic look back at a more youthful time in our own lives one in which we felt like we could do anything as long as we gave it our all and through that feeling of nostalgia we can live our youth through the eyes

3:48 of the characters even if we've never so much as seen a koto let alone played and joined a koto club and that isn't even to speak about the actual koto tracks themselves maybe i'm biased for being a classical music nerd but i don't think any sports anime has ever hyped me up as much as the actual competition pieces getting performed in this show i'm no expert on koto but i have actually learned the basics of the instrument and my god i didn't think any of this stuff was possible arguably you might say that the soundtrack is too grandiose for what it represents but given that high school life in japan is often seen through rose-colored lenses at least as far as anime is concerned this is exactly the kind of music that fits a show about an underdog group of misfits trying to take their koto club to the

4:35 national championships i mean you wouldn't question this kind of music in something like haikyuu so just think of it as hinata and kagayama plucking zithers instead of spiking balls and those are the words that i wrote in the script and i'm sticking by them and now we're hitting broadway except that we're still in japan and that this song regardless of how musical theater it sounds is in a show that has nothing to do with stage plays no what we have here is one of the many bops you can hear in or welcome to the ballroom just listening to the track playing right now it should be pretty clear that these

5:20 songs are meant to make you want to get up and strut your stuff and in that sense hayashiyuki has certainly succeeded in his compositions he's pretty well known in the anime music world for composing the soundtracks to shows like the aforementioned haikyuu death parade and a little-known shonen series you might have heard about called my hero academia hearing these dance oriented tracks however you wouldn't immediately assume that the person responsible for this was also responsible for this [Music] versatility and style is super important

6:06 for a composer though and the monotonous nature of certain composer's styles is part of the reason i've gotten sort of tired of hearing osts by kadyroyuki and sawano hiroyuki as brilliant as they are their styles really don't change all that much from soundtrack to soundtrack and as much as i'd like to argue that more here i'll save it for another time like any composer hyaci's familiar style creeps through in the less dance oriented tracks fusing electronics electric guitars and drums with orchestral instruments in a way that just makes you want to scream for the protagonists the high flying strings with underlying guitar chords and breathy coral vocals will make you cry for deku and the heroes i mean

6:51 tatara chinatsu whoever he's dancing with at the time but the best thing about anime osts is when a composer can fuse their usual style with the style of the show and hyodo's tango is one such track where the intensity of hayashi's composition style perfectly mixes with the imposing nature of kyoto's character to create a pasado blessed track that basically beats tatara down to say hey punk stay in your lane it never quite feels as imposing when you hear it in the show because of the low volume they play it at so you can hear the dialogue over top but listening to its standalone gives off the same sort of vibe you get as if you were watching it with the visuals and that sort of briefly covers how composers are able to fit their styles into the music you hear and it's subjectively quite beautiful but it's not as though these composers

7:37 are never doing anything musically interesting either and it's in these tracks that just seem pretty on the surface that incredible musical things can happen have a listen to a few excerpts from the clanad afterstory op and see if you notice anything abnormal about it [Music] um [Music] sounds like your standard kind of j-pop song right well actually it has more rhythmic

8:23 modulation than a lot of modern contemporary music and what that means is that the number of beats in any given bar changes all the time you know that with most pop songs you can count one two three four or with a waltz you can count one two three one two three but go back to those excerpts and try counting a beat to the music you'll find that there's a steady pulse for most of it but the phrasings don't really work mainly because the first one is going in groups of three four three three three four three four the second transitioning from three to four and the last one from four to a completely different kind of rhythmic value of five eight a number that basically doesn't exist outside of contemporary and jazz music

9:08 and that's still ignoring the 1 bar of 6 8 mixed in amongst the 5 8 to give the end of the first phrase a slight suspension before blasting right back into that bombardment of 5 8 syllables i mean seriously whoever said pop music was simple has clearly never heard anything composed and arranged by maida dune the man is an absolute rhythmic and melodic monster and that's just talking about his music the example playing now is a track called gaidan kosetsu or gossip and rumors from bakimonogatari and fits the avant-garde aesthetic of shaft's art style pretty much to a t highlighting kosaki satoru's willingness to explore less conventional music

9:54 in what is otherwise a conventional form of entertainment anime the rhythmic pattern is fairly simple and extremely minimalist in composition but the strange beat groupings make it difficult to comprehend that the piece is technically all written in 4 4 meaning that you could tap out beats of 4 to it like you would your average pop song but trust me i tried it and it's one of the most horrible experiences you could possibly have if you have any sense of rhythm whatsoever [Music] the reason for this is because the b

10:40 groupings are in groups of three and two which isn't necessarily strange in and of itself but because of the placement of the beats of two for example in final fantasy 7's those who fight and many other tracks like it it's easy to sort of jam along to it because the phrase is always set up with four sets of three creating a nice grouping of twelve and then two sets of two creating another group of four that in essence leads to a nice even grouping of four groups of four you could easily tap your foot in four and it would still sound fine with this because the groupings always lead into a multiple of two or four gaidan kosetsu doesn't work this way because rather than a nice set of

11:27 three three three three two two or twelve plus four we get three three three two two three which leaves us with well nothing that can be easily pinned down it's kind of like nine plus seven or six plus seven plus three or six plus five plus five but no matter what you do none of those groupings are equally divisible by two or three and so your foot tapping feels like it gets out of sync as soon as those groups of two hit your brain is expecting another b grouping of three to get you back in sync but the sudden two plus two keeps you out of sync and the following three feels more like the start of the next phrase than the end of the first one which tricks you into feeling like you're supposed to be in sync with the

12:13 offbeat for the whole second phrase because we're trained to find patterns and constants to feel at ease it starts to confuse our brains and we start to question whether there even is a set rhythm to the piece unless of course you happen to be a highly proficient percussionist that's used to these kinds of weird rhythms but that probably isn't the case for most of us that isn't even considering that it throws us off even more when after the weird out of sync second phrase the melody drops down a half step so there's no chance for our brains to catch up and feel like we found a pattern even if the pattern is exactly the same as it was just a moment before [Music] now maybe that was a bit too technical and for something like bakimonogatari with its lightning-fast dialogue and appealingly weird aesthetic

12:59 it feels a bit more complex than the average interloper is willing to dedicate the time listening to so for something that's a little more accessible and easier to follow take a listen to marine snow from naginos kara or a lil in the sea [Music] the piano as you'll notice is clearly playing the same five notes in succession rising and then starting again from the lowest note over and over this continues to the whole piece and the natural assumption is that the track itself is written in the uncommonly used 5 4 time signature 5 4 itself is a little odd but you probably know more tracks written in 5 4 than you realize take the mission impossible theme for

13:45 example the thing is that despite having a phrase of five opening the piece up and continuing as a sort of ostinato-like constant to tie the piece together the guitar comes in and shatters that by playing in groups of you guessed it four now we have two time signatures playing over top of each other one with phrases of five and one with phrases of four of course this doesn't last very long as the other instruments join in you quickly realize that the piece is actually written in 4 4 and not in 5 4 as they all start to accompany the guitar and the piano becomes more of a background effect than an actual part of the music but it's interesting that it's used to both open and close the piece given that it's the only instrument that isn't actually in the same time

14:31 signature as all the other parts it's sort of like the one thing different from all the others and yet it ties it together kind of like how chisaki gets left behind when the ceremony goes to [ __ ] leaving her stranded on land and oh god jizaki it's gonna be okay we'll get through this together now i could spend hours talking about any one of these soundtracks but i want to save those for full episodes dedicated to specific shows or composers what this video was for was simply to give a bit of insight into the actual music that goes into this kind of medium and why it's so much more important and so much more than just background noise rarely do i find that anime soundtracks fall into the same sort of traps that the soundtracks for western shows do

15:16 and even in anime movies where the music is occasionally written as a score instead of a soundtrack there's just something about the music and anime that often has a more characteristic touch that doesn't feel weird to listen to standalone or sometimes even without any contextual knowledge of the show it's written for and as someone who can type soundtrack into my music library and have over 600 albums come up most of which are either from anime or games i have a pretty good understanding of which soundtracks work standalone and which ones kind of need the visuals in order to work well but maybe that's just me and my weird obsession with background music what do you guys think about anime music is it worth listening to on its own do you even care about background music at all i have a huge repository of ost

16:01 knowledge that's basically spilling out of my brain that i'm ready to start sharing with the world so let me know down in the comments what you guys think about anime music and don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button i've also just launched a patreon alongside this channel because honestly who knows when i'm gonna get demonetized or copyright flagged so if you like what i'm doing i'll leave a link down in the description so you can support me over there and i can keep making these kinds of videos but for now that's all for today thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one