Finding Music in Manga: Exploring Yaoi through Contemporary Piano Composition

Abstract

The visual world of manga and anime is readily identifiable as influencing disparate visual media. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino used segments of manga inspired storytelling in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Artist Murakami Takashi has adopted the manga character form in large 3D sculptures and American cartoons such as Futurama and The Simpsons have depicted characters using the manga/anime aesthetic for various comic situations or cultural allusions. Similar to these visual adaptations of the dominant manga aesthetic, this chapter explores the ways in which I, as a composer, use the visual cues within manga to help articulate musical material. Having grown up watching anime every morning on television, I began reading manga in high school. Learning of more mature material, my reading and viewing broadened into my late teens and early twenties. This direct involvement with a visual medium is in contrast to my history as a composer. For the majority of my compositional development, I have looked towards other composers for musical inspiration and ideas, which is often of the musical pedagogical model. When I began writing music for solo clarinet, for example, I looked at the history of writing for the clarinet, exploring how composers employed the instrument, considering the instrument’s possibilities in different ensembles and the qualities of its different timbres. However, there is no question that my deep affinity for and involvement with anime and manga as a reader has affected my personal aesthetic. I was spurred by this to further investigate how I might respond to manga with my music. I am no longer just a consumer of manga but enter into dialogue with it as an artist, adding to the creative body of manga culture through intermedial translation. In the same way that I add to the breadth of the clarinet, I add to the breadth of manga, albeit through music.