Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer, producer, and actor who died last Tuesday, was a musician of sophisticated talent. For many, the way he intermingled cacophony with dense synth, and his interest in both silence and sound, made Sakamoto timeless and avant-garde. But for me, Sakamoto was first and foremost a conjurer of layered emotion, as exemplified in his many film compositions.
Sakamoto’s scores weren’t tinkly and whimsical like Alexandre Desplat’s, nor were they sweeping and dramatic like John Williams’s. Sakamoto wrote music that made living in an emotional in-between space audible, as in several of the orchestral songs in The Last Emperor and in the opening piano of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Sakamoto’s music was interested in the intersection of beauty and terror, the way a soul can survive even as a body falters.
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