Words by Charles Steinberg

What filmmakers and their audiences wish for a score to achieve, and not always consciously, is a deepened sense of belonging within the fictional setting.

At its most heightened, this sense is practically tactile. That was the objective of Leopold Ross and co-composers, Atticus Ross and Nick Chuba, as they set out to create the sonic world of Shōgun, the FX/Hulu update to the classic fish out of water tale that enchanted audiences this past spring. 

The audience is transported to Japan at the turn of the seventeenth century, and while the mystical majesty of the rural environment at the dawn of the Edo period provided all the inspiration Ross and partners needed to weave a musical fabric, it was just as crucial creating a sense of cold displacement with their treatments. This was to intensify the perspective of the story’s Western protagonist, British sailor John Blackthorne, who at the outset finds his ship marooned in the harbour of a land alien to him in all manner of ways, most profoundly in its customs. 

In an extended back and forth with the score’s instrumental landscapers, Leo, Atticus, and faithful facilitator turned formidable composer Nick Chuba, located the balance between the absorbing and the disorienting. Long, tunnelling accompaniments guide us through immersive but strange terrain where the ground beneath your feet may shift at any moment. Finding familiarity with the previously un-encountered, Ross bridged the generational divide between era-specific Japanese musical styles and the state-of-the-art techniques used to amplify them, even mutate them away from something earthbound. The result was a score as bold as it is vaporous, keeping step with a contemporary reframing of Shōgun, and hooking its viewers in tow.

Tell us about your upcoming performance. 

The performance is on June 7th, and it’s taking place at Royce Hall — it’s a 3000-seat hall they have there. I’ll be performing some Shōgun, and I'm also performing Monarch, which is the Godzilla show. It’s Deadline's big Emmy contender concert. I want to say around seven or eight shows are doing suites. I'm in two of them; Monarch and Shōgun. We're focusing on the big thematic material, sprinkling in the heavy hitters across eight minutes. So the main title theme of Shōgun will be in there. And of course one of the main protagonists,  Toronaga’s theme, is in there.

Maybe the variations are subtle, but I couldn't tell that Toronaga had his own theme.

Well, the aesthetic of the way that I approach music is not like Darth Vader's theme. It's not something that you get bashed over the head with necessarily. And sometimes it could be more of a tonal quality: when a certain character appears on screen, there's a certain type of sound rather than a melody. But in Toranaga's case, there is a very specific melody made by a very specific Japanese bowed instrument instrument. I'm not entirely certain of the pronunciation, but the spelling is kokyū. That instrument only plays when Toranaga is on screen — it's not featured in any other cues.

What about John Blackthorne’s theme?

Blackthorne's theme is an iteration of the main title theme. In the early episodes of the show, we made a point of holding off on the thematic material. Our approach, specifically in episode one and two, was to think about the psychology of the audience a lot. We really wanted people to feel the same kind of unease that the crew of the Erasmus felt. Because this is the period equivalent of crash landing on an alien planet. We wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable. We felt that there was a risk that if you approached it in too traditional a sense, that the audience would feel comfortable. We didn't want that. We intentionally made the first episodes very tonal. I'm not sure if you know, but Eastern tuning is different to Western tuning. So especially in that period, all of the period instruments of which we recorded many, are all pitched at 430 Hertz and the Western standard tuning is 440. We intentionally left that kind of microtonal dissonance in, meaning that we didn't tune to it. We left them rubbing against each other a little bit in those early episodes to create that dis-ease.

Was the idea to play with pitch something that came from researching eastern musical traditions?

We had dipped our toe into traditional Japanese instrumentation previously on another project we did a couple of years ago, and we learned enough then to know that there was something really interesting there that could lend itself to what we do. So we had a little sense. But then when we came into Shōgun, we did a lot of deep research of both the instruments and the music of the Edo period, and also contemporary classical Japanese music. Essentially, during our research of listening, we came across Taro Ishida, who is an arranger and also a manager of artists in Japan.

He opened up this whole world of Gagaku instrumentation. Gagaku is the specific music that they would play in the courts of Japan in the era of the show. So we got in touch with Taro, and had some early experimental sessions. These were sort of like fact-finding missions, if you will. It wasn't necessarily, “Hey, here's this thing I wrote on the piano, play it on your instrument.” It wasn't that. It was more about getting an understanding of what traditional Gagaku phrases are and the ranges of different instruments. Taro really opened up that whole world to us. We couldn't have made what we made without Taro.

What type of instruments are used in Gagaku?

The Hitchi-Ritchi, which is like a reed instrument. The ryūtekii, which is a flute. The Biwa, which is a very kind of staccato plucked instrument. And then some taiko drums… I think a lot of the time when you say taiko drums, people think of the drums of war. Yes, taiko drums can be that — and we did record sessions of those types of taiko drums — but there's also a lot more range to them, and when you're specifically in the gagaku ensembles, it's not some massive roaring low end thing. It's not in such a deep register, and it's also playing phrases that aren't necessarily rhythmic, they're more exponential.

I think you'll hear across the score, you hear a lot of percussive phrases which are kind of slowly speeding up. That's a gagaku phrase. I think that kind of phrasing is so prominent to the point where I would say a lot of Westerners would identify that as Japanese phrasing. I mean, it's something that kind of seems to have crossed over into our understanding, like what we identify about Eastern music. From what I understand, that was indicative of a scene change. If there was some type of performance happening and there's a Gagaku ensemble playing, that would tell us that we're shifting to a different scene.

The most consistent thing that I picked up on throughout was these long extensions of notes and almost to the point where you're trying to get a characteristic of wind, air, mist, fog — giving a sense of place, environment and even climate to some degree. How did you achieve that with the traditional instrumentation and your ways of processing?

First of all, I think it's important to say that the goal was never to just make period Japanese music. The goal was to create a sound that was specific to this incredibly detailed world that Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks had created. But, essentially, we sort of developed a technique which was recording the Gagaku players playing traditional phrases, bringing that back into our world, and building bespoke contact instruments out of the processed Gagaku ensembles playing, then letting those samples inform what we write. So, essentially, if I hit a key on the keyboard, it might play a harmony. It's not just one note; it's these guys harmonising together. Then we built sketches based on that, sent those back to Taro, had the guys play over that again – sort of almost reacting to what we'd written on these kind of warped, mutated patches that we built out of their original recordings.

Pretty much every sound is made of those players. We were focusing on what these different instruments had to offer and we discovered that the Hitchi-Ritchi doesn't really hold a consistent pitch. Played in its natural voice, it's always wavering. We found that when we took that, and brought it into our world and processed it, that was really reacting well. We built a lot of instruments that we felt, again, lent themselves to that idea of a stranger in a foreign land.

One thing that was especially effective was part of the climactic cue of at the end of episode six, where Toronaga rallies the troops, and there was a chant that was taken, warped, extended and expanded. It trailed off in this kind of guttural loop. Could you describe that process?

Yeah, that was actually pretty amazing. We had been doing some early sessions with Taro, and he's got an encyclopaedic knowledge of Japanese music of that era. So he would be telling us about various things, and one thing he mentioned to us was Buddhist monks who perform a specific type of chant called Shomyo. And he just mentioned in passing, “Hey, first of all, they're monks, they're not musicians. You can't book them for a session (laughs). But they're doing a festival at their temple in Chiba Prefecture, and I could go up there with some mics and see if I can capture their rehearsal.” We were like, “Fuck yeah, do that.” So he was able to capture various chants of Shomyo technique. We then brought that back again and put it through the same process that I described of the Gagaku instrumentation so that we could kind of build a palette. So, what you hear at the end of episode six is one of those Shomyo phrases that we kind of embellished into that loop that you're describing.

Is there a quick way to describe what that process is, in a technical sense?

Essentially, it's twisting it based on the various processes that we've kind of built up in our studios. You're talking about chains of effects that we've built over years. It's more like I’ve got some great raw material. I'm gonna experiment by passing it through various things. I'm gonna spend a day or two passing it through things without much consideration of what I'm doing at this exact moment. I want to get lost in it. I want the subconscious to take over. And then in three days time after I spent the two days doing this, I'll go back and edit it. And I'll find something cool.

One of my favourite pieces of the whole series was when Mariko's husband Buntaro was preparing the tea for her. I loved that whole scene and that piece of music.

Yeah, that one posed an interesting challenge because we had to find the balance of empathy for Bantaro — even though everything you've seen of him is that he's kind of a complete asshole. You also wanted to understand Mariko's position. But it's not really a scene about Mariko's arc, therefore it doesn't make sense to play her theme. It was definitely one that we had to approach as standalone and it had to have a particular tone.

Was that a situation where you decided it wasn’t quite making it, or did you ever get notes from the wider team?

Both, yeah. With Shōgun, there was a luxury of time — much more so than on any other project I've worked on. In certain cases, (co-creator) Justin would suggest things which we would run with. For example, Lady Ochiba, who appears most prominently in episodes five and six — Justin felt very strongly that her theme should be based on the female voice. So we spent a lot of time, again with Taro, understanding the different vocal stylings of the Edo period, working to take those and bring them into an aesthetic that underlined Lady Ochiba's role in the story, and then developing a theme around that. I would say that her theme is one of the themes I'm most proud of, and also one of the most interesting from a score's perspective, in the sense that it actually has a lead vocal in it, which Justin requested. He was like, “I want there to be a lyric with this person. And I want the lyric to be: “Flowers are only flowers because they fall,” which is a line that she says later on in the series that's very impactful and to do with her arc as a character, and her relationship with Mariko.

How did you approach the earthquake scene?

We actually worked heavily with the sound designers and reworked the scene because — in an earlier version — we had music almost telegraphing that something bad was going to happen. It took a while to figure out the right push and pull. And really what it was about was removing the music and kind of working with the sound designer who kind of sucked out all of the ambient sound. One of the crazy things about earthquakes is that it’s almost like nature knows before you do; all the animals go silent. The kind of natural atmosphere gets sort of sucked away to nothing. Then Toronaga kind of looks out across the way and you see this swarm of birds coming, and that's when everything kicks off.

That was something that we worked on together with the sound designers — to get that balance. That's something that I love about scoring, and I think some people that often get overlooked in the process are the people who are mixing the show. The person who's sitting at the board who's got the sound effects, the dialogue and the music at his fingertips. If you've got a good person doing that, that can really elevates things further. We were working with a guy called Steve Pederson, who I've worked with many times before, who is brilliant at doing that.

Before this show, there was the book and the 1970s adaptation. As a composer, what is your immediate feeling when you're being asked to revisit something that's already been done?

For me, it wasn't a concern. My approach, to be honest, was not to read the book and not to watch the original show, because I didn’t want my judgement to be coloured one way or the other. What I knew very quickly was the level of detail that Justin was working on. Like the guy is extremely detail oriented, and he was extremely focused on doing this right, doing that in the way that it should be done, in this era. We live in a world where we are used to an incredibly high bar. And I could tell he was pushing for the very roof of that.

You followed the Lord. It's like he was Lord Toranaga in this situation.

(laughs) I guess what I'm trying to say is, once I had conversations with him, it was very clear this was going to be something that was executed with a high level of taste. So I felt confident from that point. But I think, for example, if someone came to me like, “Hey, do you want to do the new Ghost in the Shell?” I'd probably say no, because that's something that I am more familiar with. You're not going to top that. It's just not going to happen. So you're always fighting a losing battle in that case. I think that this was a little bit different in the sense that the original series was a product of its time, and we live in a very different time now and — most importantly — this is a product of our time, of the highest quality.

Shōgun is available to watch online. Listen to the soundtrack by Leopold Ross, Atticus Ross & Nick Chuba here.