Fumio Hayasaka

• Name — Fumio Hayasaka • Born — 19 August 1914 • Birthplace — Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Empire of Japan • Died — 15 October 1955 • Place of death — Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan • Other Names — 早坂 文雄 • Occupation — Composer

Hayasaka was born in the city of Sendai on the main Japanese island of Honshū. In 1918, Hayasaka and his family moved to Sapporo on the northern island of Hokkaidō. In 1933, Hayasaka and Akira Ifukube organized the New Music League, which held a new music festival the year after. Hayasaka won a number of prizes for his early concert works; in 1935, his piece Futatsu no sanka e no zensōkyoku won first prize in a radio competition, and another concert piece, Kodai no bukyoku, won the 1938 Weingartner Prize. Other early works include a Nocturne (1936) for piano and the orchestral Ancient Dance (1938). In 1939, Hayasaka moved to Tokyo to begin a career as film composer. By early 1940, Hayasaka was seen as "a major composer for Japanese Cinema".

Fumio Hayasaka had a celebrated association with the pre-eminent Japanese director Akira Kurosawa which was short-lived due to Hayasaka's early death. The 1948 film Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) was the first film directed by Akira Kurosawa that Hayasaka composed music for. The director and composer collaborated to test "oppositional handling of music and performance". Their collaboration turned into a very deep artistic relationship, with Hayasaka contributing ideas to the visual part of the film. In his autobiography, Kurosawa would say that working with Hayasaka changed his views on how film music should be used; from then on, he viewed music as "counterpoint" to the image and not just an "accompaniment". This is also the first film that Kurosawa used Toshiro Mifune as an actor. Among the films Hayasaka scored for Kurosawa are Stray Dog (1949), Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954). During the 1950s, Hayasaka also composed the scores for some of the final works of another Japanese director, Kenji Mizoguchi. Hayasaka composed music for Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and The Crucified Lovers (1954). The 1950 film Rashomon was especially significant for Hayasaka. This film won the 1951 Golden Lion from the Venice film festival, and is considered the first Japanese film to be widely seen in the West. In the Japanese film culture, directors normally wanted music that sounded like well-known Western works; Kurosawa specifically had asked Hayasaka to compose music that sounded like Maurice Ravel's Boléro. Masaru Satō, then a young composer, was so impressed with the music that he decided to study with Hayasaka. This film was also related to the atomic scar of the Japanese culture; although the American occupation forces forbade the Japanese media from "criticizing America's role in the tragedy" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rashomon depicts a historical era of Japan where her cities are in ruin and social chaos abounds. Hayasaka was continually productive in the years leading up to his death. In 1950, he founded the Association of Film Music. The 1953 film Ugetsu, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, featured a score by Hayasaka; the film won the silver prize at the 1953 Venice Film Festival. The year after, 1954, Hayasaka did another Mizoguchi film, the jidai-geki Sansho the Bailiff (Sansho dayu). This film shared the 1954 Silver Lion prize from the Venice Film Festival with Kazan's On the Waterfront, Fellini's La Strada, and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai, a Kurosawa jidai-geki film, also features music by Hayasaka. At the time, it was the largest Japanese film production ever. This film featured strong directorial music choices that are closely related to Western symphonic concert music. Masaru Sato assisted with the orchestration of Hayasaka's score. This score utilized the leitmotif, which is a method of compositional organization borrowed from western operas. During his time in Tokyo, Hayasaka also wrote several notable concert works including Ancient Dances of the Left and on the Right (1941), a Piano Concerto (1948) and the orchestral suite Yukara (1955). Hayasaka served as a musical mentor to both Masaru Satō and Tōru Takemitsu.

In 1955, Hayasaka died of tuberculosis in Tokyo at the age of 41. He died while working on the score for I Live in Fear (Record of a Living Being, Ikimono no kiroku), so Masaru Sato completed the score. The depth of the relationship between Hayasaka and Kurosawa is shown in that this film was based on a conversation between the two friends. Hayasaka was very ill at the time, and pondering the fear of his own death. Weak and sickly from TB, he told Kurosawa that "with this illness threatening my life, I can't work." Kurosawa was deeply affected by his friend's death and "fell into a deep depression". The film Record of a Living Being combined his depression and the Japanese atomic scar to create a film that illustrates the "human experience in the atomic age".

Hayasaka's early musical style was late-Romantic with influences of traditional Japanese music. In the years before his death his style drifted towards atonality and modernism. Keeping with tradition and the demands of film makers, while scoring for films his music was closely related to (and often borrowed from) western orchestral music.

• Prelude for Two Hymns (1936) • Ancient Dance (1938) • Overture in D (1939) • Adagio for strings (1940) • Ancient Dances on the Left and on the Right (1941) • The Tale of the Tree of Muku (1946) • Piano Concerto (1948) • Metamorphosis for orchestra (1953) • Yukara (1955)

• Kunshi no Iori, for piano (1934) • Nocturne No. 1, for piano (1937) • Piano Pieces for Chamber (1941) • Four unaccompanied songs to poems by Haruo Sato for solo soprano (1944) • Romance, for Piano • Nocturne No. 2, for piano (1947) • Autumn, for piano (1947) • String Quartet (1950) • Suite in Seven Parts (1952)