Transcultural Musical Encounters / 2: A Cultural History of Dvořák’s Largo from Meiji Era to Anime

This chapter is to be read in synthony and continuality with Chapters 5 and 11 . Like those, it starts its discourse with the opening of Japan’s borders in 1868, when arts and ideas from Europe and North America flooded into the country, bringing rapid changes to many areas of Japanese life. Film, animation, and other forms of visual entertainment flourished, and Japanese composers were quick to adopt the techniques they learnt from western film- and animation scores. As western music became ingrained in Japanese society, certain pieces and composers materialised as favourites and took on their own special significance. One prominent example is the Largo second movement of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor “From the New World”, Opus 95 (popularly known as the “New World Symphony”), which has a strong presence in both Japanese and western life but is understood differently in each culture. The chapter looks at examples of Dvořák’s Largo and how it functions in anime by defining the symphony’s history and context in both western and Japanese cultures, uncovering what experiences it might communicate to Japanese viewers, and examining the result when creators combine the Largo with anime’s images.