Imaginary Worlds - Scoring Godzilla

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

We all know Godzilla’s iconic roar, but the musician who scored Godzilla's rampages is not as well known. The composer Akira Ifukube’s collaboration with the director Ishiro Honda is fascinating because the two men had different ideas of what Godzilla represented. Honda filmed Godzilla as a monster, but Ifukube saw Godzilla as an anti-hero. Erik Homenick, John DeSentis, and Reiko Yamada explain how this artistic conversation between the music and the visuals added layers of depth that helped turn a monster into an icon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. And this guy needs no introduction. But the composer of that music does. Now, until recently, I hadn't thought much about who wrote the music to Godzilla. And that's partially because the music just fits so perfectly with the visuals. And then I talked to John DeSantis. He is a conductor who specializes in performing the music of Akira Ifkube, the man who scored many Godzilla films, including the first movie from 1954.

Ifkube, his music, especially for Godzilla himself, the monster himself or herself, was very visual. Like the theme, like the bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, like that, like it's drawing your eye upwards. The theme is going upwards and like, oh, my God. And then you peaks and then it comes back down. It's very visually like you're looking up and you're seeing this larger than life horrific creature. I asked John, what is a really unique thing about Yves Koube that only he as a conductor or maybe a musician would notice? And he said, Yves Koube loves to use alternating time signatures. I didn't know what that meant.

So explain it to me. Most pop songs and stuff you hear are in four four four you know one two and three and four you can have a mix of that and or something can start and go from three to five which is one and two and three one and two and three and four and five one and two and three and then you know he'll throw in like a three like one two three one and two and three like like the like the god theme, the theme that opens Godzilla 1954 is actually an alternating four, four, and five, four beat. So it's like ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's so funny to hear you do that. I hear the music in my head every time you do that.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Yves Koube's work on Godzilla is that he and the director, Ishiro Honda, had different ideas about what Godzilla represented. The director, Honda, saw Godzilla purely as a monster. But to Yves Koube, Godzilla was an anti-hero. Now, usually in that kind of situation, the director would make the composer comply to his vision or he'd replace the composer. But Honda had so much respect for Yves Coubet, he let him compose a score that tells a different story musically than what's on screen.

And this is a rare story of two artists having a conversation that takes place within a single work of commercial art. And that conversation, that artistic conversation between the music and the visuals, adds layers of depth to the movie. But their disagreement wasn't just about Godzilla. It was really about Japan and its role during World War II. How that played out in a Godzilla movie is just after the break. Eric Hominick runs a website about Akira Ifkube, and Eric has immersed himself in studying the

composer's work. And Eric says you can't separate his music from his life experiences. Every creative choice that Yves Coubet made came from a personal place, going back to his childhood. As a child, when he was playing outside, he loved collecting reptiles and insects. He would go out into the forest and collect and capture these things and bring them home. And he was just fascinated, studying their anatomy, what they looked like, what their behaviors were like. If you think about it, in these monster films, what are these monsters? Well, they're giant reptiles. They're giant insects. These are like blown up super images of the animals that he collected and was so close to and fascinated by as a youth.

There was something about these films that, in a sense, brought out the child in him. If Kube was raised in a town called Hokkaido, which is deep in the north of Japan, in that part of Japan is an ancient home for an indigenous people called the Ainu. And having so many Ainu friends, I think through his interactions with them, he was able to develop an even more profound and, dare I say, spiritual connection to nature. The Ainu are ethnically distinct from most Japanese. Historically, the Ainu had been looked down upon as primitive. If Kube found that fascinating. In fact, he would later call his own style of music primitivism, and he often used Ainu culture as his inspiration.

But as a conductor, John DeSantis can see that if Kubé's primitivism is a trick of the ear. He says, look at the music in the first Godzilla film, when the locals on Odo Island are performing a ritual dance about their history with Godzilla. The music feels very traditional. But if Kubé is using mostly Western instruments. It sounds like he's using traditional instruments, but he's not. He has one traditional instrument on there, which is a drum called a piangu. And that's kind of what has like that woodblock, like kind of sound to it.

So in reality, it's deceptively primitive. It's almost like it's advanced and it's tricking your mind into thinking that it's a little bit more primitive than it actually is. and is tricking your mind into thinking that it's a little bit more primitive than it actually is. Raiko Yamada is a composer and musician. She studied under Ifukube at the Tokyo College of Music. She was always impressed with his work, and it got along very well. But for many years, she couldn't understand why he was so enamored with ancient Japanese folk music.

I grew up studying Western piano, and most of Japanese musicians start with German textbook and learning only Western music, sadly. And so, in fact, when I encountered Hikubei's Piano Suite for the first time, a piece that is based on Japanese folk song. So it did not interest me, and I have no idea how to play it. But then many years later, Reiko Yamada was living in Chicago, and she got into a car accident, a very serious car accident. Yeah, actually, I was in surgical intensive care for 11 days, almost like close to die, and then it made me my kind of life, change of life.

So how to face the life or how to think about, you know, like, it was big things. It's one of the reasons maybe I started to practice his piece. Learning how to play his music became part of her healing process, physically and emotionally, because in rediscovering his work, she could feel his deep spiritual connection to ancient Japanese culture. Living many years away from Japan in the United States, I started thinking more about own culture or identity, and I thought it's really need to think about more Japanese culture.

And I began to reflect again on the teaching of Maestro Ikube. So in my quest to find a deeper artistic identity, I was reminded his remarks about the understanding of one's own cultural identity. I was thinking more seriously about who I am or what should I do in the United States as a Japanese, you know, so many things. Now, back in the 1950s, Yufkube's contemporaries would have been surprised to hear him described as a quintessential Japanese composer.

His music had not been accepted for a long time in Japan, since the Japanese music world was influenced by European style after World War II. And many Japanese blindly appreciate only imported culture and reject or even despise traditional culture. And Eric says at the time, Japan's cultural elite looked down on Ifukube. A good example is a composer called Hikaru Hayashi, who was considered to be a leader in the Japanese music world at the time. considered to be a leader in the Japanese music world at the time. He was a very cosmopolitan composer, wanted to promote Western music in Japan at the time, and referred to Akira Ifukube as an idiot. When Ifukube's one and only symphony, called Sinfonia Topkara, which is based on Ainu musical aesthetics, was written in 1954. Hayashi lambasted the piece, said that we can't even qualify this symphony as music based on what we know music to be.

Now, 1954 was also the year that Ifkube was offered the job of composing music for Godzilla. His friends, who knew how much he was struggling to gain respectability, told him, don't take this job. Colleagues of his thought the film seemed like it would be pulp trash. It was a monster film, not very serious. Why would you want your name and career to be attached to something so silly or juvenile? to be attached to something so silly or juvenile. And, you know, despite people very vigorously urging him not to take such an assignment,

the composer himself was actually quite excited about it. He said that when he read the screenplay, he got like an electric shock, a true rush of excitement over the themes of the film. But as I mentioned earlier, if Kubé's excitement over the themes of the film. But as I mentioned earlier, Yves Coubet's understanding of the themes of the film was different than how the director understood them. And once again, we need to go back to his life story. During the war, he was very pro-empire.

And John says he can feel Yves Coubet's nostalgia for Imperial Japan in the score to Godzilla. Mr. Ifkube was a nationalist for most of his life. He still was at the time of Godzilla. It was very, very soon after the war. In his military march in the film, which actually has its origins in a classical piece he wrote called Kishimai, It has its origins in a classical piece he wrote called Kishimai. It would make sense to me that he would use that march that began essentially as a good fortune dance for the Japanese Imperial Army. That was the theme that he repurposed for what became known as the frigate march or the military march for the original Godzilla. It goes without saying that Japan committed numerous atrocities.

And I think that had the composer known what was really happening, I don't think that he would have been for that. He was a very cultured and gentle man in many ways. And I don't think that he would have wanted such horrible violence for its own sake to be inflicted on people. I think that he very, although he supported Japanese efforts during the Second World War, I think he was naive as to what was really happening. Now, if Kube never saw combat during the war, his job was to reverse engineer U.S. fighter planes. And to do so, he used x-rays without a protective lead suit. Eric Hominick says, if Kube knew that radiation was dangerous. But unfortunately, lead was too expensive for wartime rations. And at the very conclusion of the war, he was walking near his laboratory one day and he

collapsed and coughed up blood due to the radiation poisoning. And he spent about a year almost bedridden directly after the war, recovering from radiation sickness. bedridden directly after the war recovering from radiation sickness. So especially in the first Godzilla film, you know, after Godzilla's rampage in Tokyo there's this very mournful music that is playing over scenes of people in hospitals, the victim of Godzilla. There's a very poignant scene where there's a young child and somebody is holding a Geiger counter up to the child and the Geiger counter is showing that this child has been irradiated, much like the victims who survived of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this very poignant, even funereal music by Yves Cuvée is playing over these scenes. I think one of the reasons why this music is so effective

is because the composer himself experienced radiation sickness, radiation poisoning. He himself was irradiated. But he was not against the atomic bomb itself. In fact, after Hiroshima, he was more shocked that the United States had the technology to make an atomic bomb and defeat the Japanese Empire. He just couldn't believe that Japan was so far behind, as it turns out, the West. And it was a little bit of a bitterness and a resentment that he never quite got over, I don't think.

I mean, he didn't have animus towards Westerners. got over, I don't think. I mean, he didn't have animus towards Westerners. I mean, Americans and Europeans would often visit him at his home in Tokyo to interview him about his music, about his film scores, and he was always extremely welcoming to all of them. But I really don't think in the more general sense, he got over the immense disappointment that Japan could actually be beaten by the West. And John says those feelings influenced the way that Ifkube saw Godzilla, right from the start. One of the things that fascinated him about the character of Godzilla was that he had said, I believe, that in World War II, Japan was defeated by more advanced weapons.

But he loved the fact that there was this creature that advanced weaponry could not destroy. And they ultimately had to come up with something even more advanced, that being the oxygen destroyer, to destroy Godzilla. During Godzilla's Tokyo raid, he doesn't touch any of the ancient sites. He doesn't destroy the Imperial Palace. He doesn't wreck sites like the Asakusa Buddhist Temple. It's all modern Western-style buildings that he's toppling. So he thought that was very exciting.

And Godzilla represents the angry spirit of the pre-Westernized Japan, an ancient life force that is angry that Japan not only lost the war, but is becoming westernized. So Godzilla rises from the depths, angry at what Japan has become. Now, that was never the intention of the director, Ishiro Honda. He saw Godzilla as a cautionary tale against nuclear power. And that goes back to his life experience. If Kube understood the war entirely through Japanese media in the 1940s, which was all propaganda, but Honda saw the carnage of war up close.

Honda was conscripted no less than three times into the Japanese army during the war, and he actually did see action. And towards the end of the war, Honda was taken as a prisoner of war in China. And when Honda was at the end of the war, when Honda was being repatriated back to Japan, he actually passed through Hiroshima and saw with his own eyes what the atomic bomb did there. with his own eyes what the atomic bomb did there. So if Honda saw Godzilla as the bomb incarnate, or even war incarnate, then Godzilla was a monster that had to be defeated. But since if Kube saw Godzilla as the angry spirit of ancient Japan, then his version of Godzilla was an antihero.

And audiences started to see Godzilla that way too. I mean, if you look at the later films in the franchise, Godzilla is Japan's protector, even if he's not always stable or reliable. And Eric Hominick says you can trace that back to the influence that the music had on the audience during the very first Godzilla film, especially at the end, when we're supposed to feel relief that Godzilla has been defeated. After Godzilla is dead, Ifkube repeats the same music, this prayer for peace, to represent the tragedy of Godzilla's death

that he uses earlier in the film. After the scenes of destruction in Tokyo, there is a television broadcast of an all-girls choir singing this very mournful melody called the Prayer for Peace, mourning the victims of Godzilla. I think what the composer is doing, he's equating the victims of Godzilla. I think what the composer is doing, he's equating the death of Godzilla

directly to the death of his victims. Of course, the original Godzilla film was such a huge hit, they figured out a way to bring the monster back for a sequel, or dozens of sequels. And as the years went on, Ifkube continued scoring Godzilla films and other monster movies, or kaiju films as they're called, and he continued to use his skills as an ethnomusicologist. For instance, in King Kong vs. Godzilla, he used island folk music that was specific to where certain scenes were

taking place. Meanwhile, he kept working on classical pieces for concert halls. But his reputation as a composer of kaiju films was like the monster he couldn't escape. In fact, there was something that he said one time where he said, you know, the film score that I worked on for maybe a month or two, everybody knows that. But the concert work that I worked for on two years, nobody knows. Eventually, he went into teaching, where he encouraged his students to find their own voice, no matter what the world tells them. And I asked Raiko Yamada if her former teacher ever talked about his film experiences. He talked about film directors or movies in his class a lot.

And it really depends on the director. But I believe that he didn't take the job when the director's ideas about music were too strict. about the music were too strict. And Japanese composers also often have less time to write the music than in the U.S. This would often be frustrating for him. In the end, it was his students who got him the respect that he deserved. And they accomplished this by staging a concert performance of his

Godzilla scores. Eric Hominick says, at first, if Kube did not like this idea, he told the students that music is for movies. It does not belong in a concert hall. But people pressed him. We want to hear this music in the concert hall. This is music that deserves to be heard in the concert hall. So he finally relented and said, okay. So in 1983, he wrote three pieces of music called the Symphonic Fantasias. And these are three concert suites of music from his monster scores. The three Symphonic Fantasias were premiered in Tokyo in 1983 to rave reviews. Rave reviews. In fact, some of those reviews were written by the very same people who had dismissed him years earlier, including the critic who had once called Ifkube an idiot. And after this concert, he admitted that he was wrong. But John DeSantis thinks that Ifkube still needs more recognition in the West, that's why John has dedicated so much time to conducting Godzilla scores.

My goal is simply for people to enjoy hearing music that they never thought they'd get to hear live in that kind of setting in North America, because nobody else in North America was doing it at the time, or still is. Do you find that, I mean, what kind of reactions do you, do you get from people in that regard? I mean, do people come up to you and just say, uh, or what, what do they say? Anything from, I can't believe, uh, I've, I've ever got to hear that.

Thank you so much to you make a grown man cry. And I'm usually, you know, I just kind of say, thank, thank our musicians, you know, because the musicians are really who make that authentic sound come forth, especially the brass players and the trumpet players. This music is very hard to play sometimes. And John was excited that in the most recent film, Godzilla King of the Monsters, the composer Bear McCreary adapted Ifkube's scores throughout the film. And that is the first time that a Godzilla movie that was made in Hollywood paid tribute to Ifkube scores throughout the film. And that is the first time that a Godzilla movie that was made in Hollywood paid tribute to Ifkube. The use of his music in that new movie is probably one of the most significant

mainstream representations that he's had. I mean, at least as far as eyeballs and ears on his scores, probably since the 1960s. Raiko Yamada also wants to spread the word about Ifkube, although she focuses on performing his classical work, like the Ritmika Ostinata. When I started learning Ritmika Ostinata, it was so very difficult. And actually, I gave up a long time ago. You really? You gave up? it was so very difficult.

And actually, I gave up a long time ago. You really? You gave up? Yeah, because I love that piece so much because that piece gave me the chance to meet Ikube, Maestro Ikube. And I asked him so many questions about that piece too. But I watched the music and then like, it's impossible, I thought. I asked Raiko if she can hear a difference between the music that Ifukube wrote for concert halls as opposed to kaiju films.

In my mind, I never feel like kaiju. So he totally, you know, stay with his way of the style, like style of the composition. So that is amazing. Although not surprising, because everything he wrote was personal to him. And if Kube's story is similar to a lot of artists, they put their blood, sweat, and tears into their work. But how their work is received and what part of it is valued or remembered is out of their control. And that can be so frustrating because great artists are usually perfectionists who want to have full creative control over their work. I mean, if Kube may have wished that he was better known for his classical pieces, but he created something that

went far beyond his own life, something that is part of global culture. And he may have seen Godzilla as the spirit of ancient Japan, but in a way he became the spirit that guided the monster back again and again and again and again. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Raku Yamada, Eric Hominick, and John DeSantis. And special thanks to Joe Muszynski, a listener, who suggested this episode. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted emulinski and Imagine Worlds Pod.

And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. God bless..