the sixth station: quartal harmony and commuting
we're doing music analysis now?
My formulated kid response to a lot of adults presenting their art or their favorite art to me used to be “I don’t think I’m old enough to get this yet.” I remember that pervasive feeling from a lot of the movies, short stories, songs, and paintings I was shown was this dull emotional complexity, a tension I did not understand yet. It was an emptiness perhaps produced both by their emptiness and my inability to comprehend. There was a scene like this hidden in one of the most famous animated “children’s” movies, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It’s now my favorite movie scene possibly ever, the namesake of this newsletter: “The Sixth Station.” It is a simple, artistic scene where the movie’s protagonist, Chihiro/Sen, and spirit No Face travel outside from the main setting (the bathhouse) to seek answers from an unknown mystical figure. In the scene, water is omnipresent around the bathhouse; you (the viewer) are unsure if it’s due to flooding or just a shift in perspective. Chihiro and No Face have to rowboat to a train platform that exists suspended in the vast body of water. When the train arrives, they board a train car full of faceless spirits, distinctly ‘businessman’-shaped. The scene is dialogue-less, letting the musical score take the forefront. It is a contemplative piano and synth piece, which is still in my heavy listening rotation. It’s simply the perfect music to listen to on a silent commute. It is overall a gorgeously animated scene: the sky is painted like a Hudson River School piece, with the water reflecting it all. In comparison to all of the see-through faceless spirits on the train, Chihiro and No Face can’t help but stand out. How many times have you boarded public transportation feeling like the main character, listening to music that accentuates the feeling? I hadn’t when I first watched this movie as a kid. This is an action-less scene—as a child, you are not easily entertained here. Though, as someone who had a notorious reputation for grabbing the remote and skipping scenes/songs I absolutely did not enjoy or was bored by, I never skipped this part. I didn’t get it, but I still appreciated it.
Now, I get it. I’ll even admit to listening to “The Sixth Station” while on a train in Japan, not once, not twice, but multiple times. I now get the emptiness, and the complexity of simultaneously being the main character and the faceless businessmen filling the car. In the score, there is a near-constant bass arpeggio theme which is halfway dissonant with the treble melody. The two hands (as this is mostly a piano piece) kind of exist separate from each other, apart from brief breaks where the bass loses its rhythm and the treble loses its melody to come together in quartal chords of suspended harmony. This pattern of fourths follows Chihiro throughout the film. The treble then doubles up in high octave pairings, almost like it’s trying to drown out the bass line, but they both quiet again to group into those quartals, and hold. The piece finishes with a treble announcement, you are here.
In Japanese animation, film composers will often release a pre-production album before the official OST that accompanies the film. These albums are called “image albums,” after the process from which the music is made. The composer writes music based on a preliminary storyboard of limited pictures; the themes composed here will often go on to be used in the ‘official’ OST. What interests me about Spirited Away’s Image Album is that the piece known later as “The Sixth Station,” originally labeled “Sea,” is the only piece that carries over to the main movie score almost identically. “Waltz of Chihiro” from the Image Album is modified instrumentally to appear as “Reprise” at the end of Spirited Away. This consonance between Image Album and OST in the form of “The Sixth Station” does make sense—often what can happen when the film composer writes music for a movie that does not yet exist is a sense of broad brush thematics. In other words, the music can’t be specific enough to intricately sync up with the plot of the movie.
By the time Spirited Away was released in 2001, composer Joe Hisaishi had worked out a well-fleshed out composing routine with decades-long collaborator Hayao Miyazaki. Hisaishi would compose the Image Album, then a symphonic album (an orchestral, richer, longer version of the Image Album), then the OST. Miyazaki would take a few years at a time to finish his movies, so there was ample time for Hisaishi to tweak the score. Still, I think this makes it even more interesting that “Sea,” or, “The Sixth Station,” made it through all stages of production virtually untouched. Even as a kid, the scene silenced me, sucked me in. In my opinion, it was/is one of those instances in film where aesthetic, atmosphere, and metaphor sync and are expressed perfectly. Musically, themes and chords from the beginning and middle of the film appear and mature; visually, Chihiro’s train in a giant, ripple-less body of water is both beautiful and strikingly different from the earlier settings of the movie; metaphorically, this is the first time in the plot Chihiro is in a position of power and maturity, and sits among adults, albeit faceless adults. The themes that “The Sixth Station” references didn’t even exist in the Image Album’s time; this almost implies to me that “Sea,” “The Sixth Station” is the heart or climax of the entire film, a point for the audience to sit in contrast and reflect,“to go away from reality only to give to the viewer a new perspective to watch the world from.” (13 Bellano, Albums to Images) It is over three minutes of screentime occupied by ‘silence’ in the form of music.
“He thinks that film music has to express emotion and intelligence that can be enriched by a musical ‘sentimentalism’: “Without intelligence there is no sincere emotion, and vice versa. Sentiment is the indispensable element of truth and honesty […] I am a sentimental humanist that likes to translate emotions.”” (10 Bellano, The Parts and The Whole) The intensity of the emptiness, the tension I couldn’t yet understand as a kid was matched by something I instinctually understood: sentiment. Whether it was represented by the bass line flow or quartal harmonies in the treble hand didn’t matter to me then as much as it does now—what mattered was only how it drew me in and made me feel. The successful ‘translation of emotion’ is something all artists consciously or unconsciously strive for; when it works, you get three minutes of musical ‘silence’ that even the pickiest of kids won’t skip over.
Sources (no I’m not formatting this, what are you, my professor?):
“The Parts and the Whole: Audiovisual Strategies in the Cinema of Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi” by Marco Bellano
“From Albums to Images: Studio Ghibli’s Image Albums and their impact on audiovisual strategies” by Marco Bellano
(These articles are kind of the same but kind of different.)
Quartal, Quintal, and Secundal Harmony by Robert Hutchinson