Authorship in Music and Sound Design / 5: Tenmon and His Music for Makoto Shinkai’s Films

This chapter is a deep cultural and musical analysis of an anomalous score composer: Tenmon (pseud. of Atsushi Shirakawa). It discusses this creator from his rise in tandem with anime director Makoto Shinkai in the late 1990s to an even more astonishing—and sudden—disappearance after the duo’s final collaboration in Hoshi o ou kodomo (2011). Tenmon’s unique approach to musical composition and its relation to animation both validate the medium’s universality and challenge the premises of the Japanese social status quo. And, perhaps most importantly, the chapter reflects on the inconspicuous heaviness of Tenmon’s legacy, which, despite its pointedly limited time frame and the concentration of its revolutionary elements, makes it possible for future composers, in Japan as well as elsewhere, to organically develop new stylistic languages, directions, strategies based on Tenmon’s incipient contribution and without turning into his epigons.