When we pick up a stick and tap on a cup, a bowl or an oil drum, can we stop at that one and singular sound? Not to my knowledge. No, we must try putting another one next to the first. Slightly different pitch, slightly different rhythm. So it is, across all tribes, all cultures, all over the world. And before we know it, we are combining sounds to produce beautiful forms of expression.
With the advent of modern technology, music has become infinitely accessible. It is played on your phone, in the mall and even within the elevator. It has, in fact, become unavoidable. Bombarded by such excesses, we hear so much that we lose the ability to listen.
Thanks goodness, this movie makes us give pause. What exactly is music? How does it co-exist with our physical needs to make a living? Or to love? To believe?
Maybe as a compensation to their formalised way of life, Japanese movies tend to exaggerate. This one is no exception. Imagine a European director portraying a classical music conductor using a hammer as a baton. Or bullying the Berlin Philharmonic players like they did in this movie. Simply set aside your prejudice and enjoy the movie for all its little quirks. Vive le difference.
After the movie, I listen again, with renewed attention, to various recordings of Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Why didn't Schubert finish No. 8? How did he even manage to write what little remained knowing he had syphilis?
Music critic E. T. A. Hoffmann in one of the earliest review of Beethoven's Fifth described it as "radiant beams shoot through this region's deep night, and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy everything within us except the pain of endless longing". From a man going deaf? Was this his "Fate"?
