Kawaii aesthetics and the exchange between anime and music

Abstract

While many composers find inspiration in the musical works of others, a recent period of my compositional work has been interested not in the musical but in rendering the visual as musical. Going against the dominant musical pedagogy of studying composers and musical techniques, I have looked to Japanese anime, animated cartoons, as my source of artistic influence and found in the shapes, colours, tones and contours of animation everything I need to compose music. An added benefit of this is that it forces a correlation and consideration between the boundaries of artistic languages and sensory media. For a period in 2010 I was specifically interested in the way anime portrayed the Japanese aesthetic known as kawaii, which translates approximately as cuteness or cute. Writing for the Italian pianist Antonietta Lofreddo at this time, I was interested in composing music that explored childhood. As my own childhood was populated with cute anime characters, I took this as my creative impetus. The result was a four movement suite for piano I named the Kawaii Suite. The artistic act of writing four pieces of music drawing on kawaii aesthetics has forced me as a composer to consider the dynamic relationship between music and source material, particularly as the source material in this case is two-fold involving both the kawaii aesthetic more generally and the specific anime characters. To destabilise any formal qualities of authorship that may be used to view my process, I prefer to consider my music from this period as similar to a work of translation, which Zeller defines as ‘a work of art emanating from another author’s context’.