To ordinary people, he was known as the author of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, one of the most famous musical themes in cinema, composed for Furyo (1983), by Nagisa Oshima. Ryuichi Sakamoto held one of the main roles there, alongside his compatriot Takeshi Kitano and David Bowie, but we remembered less his presence on the screen than this epic ostinato secreting a deep melancholy with its synthesizers mixed with Japanese chimes. The instrumental will be doubled by a vocal version, Forbidden Colourssung by David Sylvian – of the aptly named British new wave band Japan – to become a Christmas and sound illustration classic – along with the Titles (1981) Olympic of the Greek colleague Vangelis. The organizers of the Barcelona games in 1992 will not be mistaken, who will order a score for the opening ceremony from Sakamoto.
Ryuichi Sakamoto thus became known worldwide with his first film music, when he was already a star in his country as a member of the electro pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra, considered the “Japanese Kraftwerk”. The musician died on March 28 in Tokyo at the age of 71, his management announced on April 2, adding as an epitaph one of Sakamoto’s favorite aphorisms, borrowed from Hippocrates: Art is long, life is short (“Art is long, life is short”).
Sakamoto had announced two years earlier that he was suffering from colorectal cancer, a second ordeal after that of the throat diagnosed in 2014, from which he had recovered. With Yellow Magic Orchestra, under his own name or in collaboration with peers such as the Brazilian composer and cellist Jaques Morelenbaum, the rock stars David Byrne and Iggy Pop or the South Korean artist Nam June Paik, he leaves an abundant body of work with a hundred of references and protean since as well intended for the cinema as for the stage or for domestic listening. Open to all the music of the Earth, it stands in perfect balance between scholarly and popular practices and is perhaps the only one to have built a bridge between the avant-garde and the “lightness” of easy-listening.
He worshiped Debussy
Born January 17, 1952 in Tokyo, Ryuichi Sakamoto was the son of publisher Kazuki Sakamoto, who published Confessions of a Mask, by Mishima, in 1949. Played the piano from an early age, he liked to tell how he had become familiar with concrete music, by listening to the sounds produced by the commuter train that took him to high school. He also liked to recall that he was born the year of the creation of 4′33″ by John Cage (a score of silence inevitably disturbed by the noises of the environment), from which he will later borrow the technique of the prepared piano.
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