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The Last Emperor Theme (1987)
By Ryuichi Sakamoto
From The Last Emperor Original Soundtrack
Listen: https://t.co/mDLXLYhIau
The assignment Bertolucci gave Sakamoto was, by Sakamoto's own description, three contradictions held in tension at once: the music had to evoke the mood of 1920s and 30s China while remaining unmistakably contemporary; it had to use Chinese material without becoming Chinese music — just as the film itself, though set in China, remains a European film; and it had to carry the melodic memorability of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence while replacing its intimate, personal motifs with something of vast historical sweep.
(from Gekkan Kadokawa 1988)
To find his footing, Sakamoto worked through a 20-volume anthology of Chinese music — spanning ancient to modern — and identified the most fundamental instrumentation: the guzheng, the pipa, and the erhu. His solution was direct, almost architectural: take those instruments and simply add them to a Western orchestra. The friction between the two worlds (East and West) was the point.
(from SELDOM-ILLEGAL 1989)
The theme is built on a pentatonic core — Mi, So, La, Si, Re — into which two notes, F♯ and C, quietly enter. Those two notes enter through the pull of chord progressions, creating a modal ambiguity he found impossible to fully untangle. Chinese music, he observed, shifts its modal center mid-piece in ways that neither traditional logic nor Western harmony alone can explain. It was precisely this slight deviation from the pentatonic — this resistance to neat categorization — that he felt answered Bertolucci's original brief to make it emotional. He labored hard over those two notes.(from Keyboard Special 1988)
Jiang Jianhua, the erhu virtuoso who performed on the score, recalled meeting Sakamoto in a Tokyo studio in 1987: "He was very polite and humble. He told us that he didn't know much about traditional Chinese instruments, but he needed them for the soundtrack. He asked me to keep playing while he composed."
(from China Daily)
The same Jiang Jianhua would later perform on Sakamoto's arrangement of SOGEN JOKA.
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