Tōru Takemitsu’s score for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran
We often ask whether film scores can exist independently of their parent movies. Some of them – Jaws, Psycho or The Godfather – take on a life of their own, becoming part of wider popular culture. The score for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) can and does have an autonomy, existing self-sufficiently as a formidable symphonic exploration of human malice and recklessness. But it is also guaranteed that after listening to only a few minutes of Tōru Takemitsu’s dark and mesmerizing music, you will be rushing to watch the film at the first opportunity.
We are in sixteenth-century feudal Japan. An aging warlord, Hidetora, abdicates and, avoiding primogeniture, bequeaths his lands to his three children. But the third child is petulant and is banished, unleashing chaos (‘ran’) upon the kingdom and a descent into personal anarchy for the elderly chieftain. Sound familiar? Kurosawa claimed it was only after he had written the screenplay that he noticed the parallels with Shakespeare’s King Lear – and they are there, but we shouldn’t focus on them too much, for the great director’s astounding final masterpiece stands gloriously, ruthlessly, on its own terms. Visually it is one of the most beautiful films ever made: a sweep of dazzling landscapes, equine choreography and exquisite costumes with awe-inspiring cinematography and a breathless production design that are all brilliantly at odds with the agonizing tale of treachery, rivalry and cruelty being let loose before us.
Given this pictorial splendour, as well as the depth of his intellectual vision and the intensity of his actors’ performances, Kurosawa needed an aural element of significant scope to match them. In the mid-1970s he invited Tōru Takemitsu, then Japan’s leading composer of film music (amongst much else), to become involved, but Kurosawa’s own conception of Ran’s musical component changed over the project’s long gestation. He went from desiring simple vocal, chant-like essentials to something far larger and more imposing, utilizing a whole symphony orchestra (along with numerous traditional Japanese instruments and idioms).
The result was a film score of enormous imagination, reach and power, with echoes of Mahlerian angst and tragedy as well as Wagnerian opulence and complexity. Yet, in truth, it is music of exceptional originality – like so much Takemitsu, a tantalizing amalgamation of the Eastern and Western sound worlds which both meant so much to him. Ran’s score is a malignant monster that writhes in agony, unleashing its fury and pain upon our ears with vast waves of orchestral grandeur and symphonic pathos, before relenting into unforgettable pastoral simplicity, sinister instrumental digressions or weird unstructured dissonance. Drums play an especially important role, as does the nostalgic, sometimes disconcerting, sound of the shinobue, a bamboo flute common to Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatre.
Attached both to the outer chaos of the kingdom, as well as to Hidetora’s inner turmoil, the ‘Doom’ motif dominates the score: high strings howl over growls from the depths of the orchestra, as a wooden block repeatedly strikes like a malicious cosmic clock. The motif never resolves, forever cycling back in on itself in an unceasing progression of restated desolation. It tells not only of the endless, repeated tragedy of human existence in an indifferent universe, but also of the karmic comeuppance for all the evil and suffering Hidetora has caused during his own cold-blooded reign.
At the centre of the score – and the film – is a sequence of immense power and pain, known as ‘Hell’s Picture Scroll’. Hidetora has become a wretched peripatetic fugitive in his former lands. Eventually he is trapped in his youngest son’s abandoned castle, which is brutally attacked by his older two sons’ armies in an act of appalling patricidal wickedness. And what Kurosawa does to the sound at this point is a master stroke: for several minutes, he removes all the ambient background noise, silencing all the clamour and clatter, neighs and screams, of the tumultuous battle raging around Hidetora, surrendering the entire aural landscape to Takemitsu’s tragic score. There are opaque strings, elegiac brass, evocative solo woodwind, all of which sound in blunt opposition to the unremitting flood of horrifying pictures of war on the screen – a contrapuntal antagonism which in turn creates its own brutally honest juxtaposition of beauty and desolation.
Suddenly reality comes back in with a crack of ear-splitting gunfire. The castle is set on fire, and the isolated ex-ruler meanders awkwardly from the burning building, materializing like a living ghost, staggering between two awestruck armies, our emotions toyed with as we pity this foolish old king. As the flames crackle and hiss, Takemitsu’s score becomes a distorted desert of restrained malevolence, full of grim orchestral mutterings, ugly misshapen dissonance, and a remote, wistful flute with chimes. Hidetora has relinquished a kingdom and, perhaps, his sanity as he wanders alone into an unknowable future (and the second half of the film).
A distressing requiem of human sorrow, this is one of the most memorable episodes in cinema. Our sense of time, space and perspective is mercilessly, insistently, undermined and confused with music and images of astonishing power: haunting, hypnotic, a chain of inconsolable calamity, grief and chaos.
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.