Miller & Katsumi - Slilence of Souls

"Silence of Souls" is Katsumi's all-time-favorite piece. He wrote the original form of this song with a different title in Japanese, "The Dream That Won't Go Away" (if it was called in English) when he was 20 years old. It had the same guitar riff as "Silence of Souls" does but was written in a different key (C major) with several ordinary diatonic triad major and minor chords; young Katsumi at that time just wrote this song as a slow pop ballad-like-song. However, he was so fond of its slow "flowing" guitar line and church-psalm-like vocal melody line as well as its melancholic but pleasant mood that he would not forget how to play and sing it so that he could do something with some components of the song later.

When he was in college Katsumi had a chance to make a feature-length documentary, "Across the River," whose theme was "death" - the religious, medical and cultural concepts of death, death cultures and life-after-death. For the ending theme music of this movie, he re-wrote "The Dream That Won't Go Away" into "Silence of Souls" by adding a number of complicated chords based on major 7ths to create some "translucent" images. He also re-wrote its lyric into the current version whose theme is the "unsure anxiety of human existence."

The listeners may notice that there are strange key changes in this piece, which could be considered to be against fundamental musical rules; the song starts with the key to E major, in the middle, the E major changes into Ab major, then it comes back to E major again, but it goes to Bb major and ends with E major. Katsumi admits this was from an accident; when he was re-writing "The Dream That Won't Go Away" to "Silence of Souls" he mistakenly played a wrong chord, but then he thought it sounded like an interesting, unexpected change temporarily to unbalance the listeners' psychological condition with some strange feeling similar to a slight anxiety and uneasiness. So he kept this strange key change and added another change like this to compose this song. Later, he used this "weird" chord change technique as his "trademark" and wrote many of his original songs in similar styles to this. Although some people may say, "Does this guy know how to write music?" he is always ready to answer, "I do not know how to write music. I just know how to write "my music."

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Katsumi
• Laurence
• Miller
• Tim
• Nagae
• 長柄克己

[LaurenceBondMiller]

Very interesting how the dissonance runs along the one repetitive guitar pattern against the other's shifting chords. Then, this contrast finally meets it's maker at the end where the two guitars seem to play several bars in near traditional harmony, making some kind of perfect sense :)