music, trauma and time
so much has been written about evangelion’s visual motif, but barely enough about its soundscape. i mean, sure, we know about the silence in that elevator scene and the irreverent use of classical music (will you ever hear handel’s messiah the same again?), and still there’s so much more to talk about.
consider this a tasting platter:
the series lies on a bed of keening cicadas (insect buffs, eva likes minminzemis and kumazemi). repetition in music psychology is shorthand for anxiety, tension, monotony. it’s linked to the freudian death drive, the loss of ego and is also a nod to the lacanian real (meaning, the world divorced from distorting perception and symbolism, the reality that won’t change according to how we wish things to be). this is played straight: cicadas scream through mundane scenes and the dull wait between battles, signaling the here and now. in ep1, the cicadas stop just before shinji sees a vision of rei to underline his departure from the real. the next time we hear them is in ep2, when shinji waits at the hospital hallway as rei is wheeled past. this time they continue to shriek, because it’s real. cicadas are altogether absent in shinji’s utopia in ep26.
misato, who can live wherever the fuck she wants in tokyo-3, picks a near-abandoned apartment building right by a noisy train crossing that sounds much like a siren. this underscores her need to be constantly on alert, on survival mode. this is how trauma works, the second impact has reconfigured her way of existing, where survival has become her one and only reason to live to the detriment of any other way of being
overhead announcements form the architecture of shinji and misato’s early relationship, where shinji expects to be instructed and misato expects to be obeyed even as both yearn for a deeper connection. the intercom chatters through nearly all of their first scenes together, even replacing the conversation when misato picks him up from the hospital in ep2. remember, shinji runs away the first time when misato demands him to want what she wants, a breach of this unspoken pact (insert hedgehog dilemma). in ep4, misato’s world is rendered near silent (save the above siren) while shinji is hounded by blaring train announcements, salesmen, screams from the cinema. misato must face her solitude while shinji struggles with a deluge of directives. once reunited, they both adopt an intercom-like speech before misato snaps, again crossing the line. shinji runs away again. the final piece is so obvious. at the end of ep4, listen.
in ep15, shinji performs bach’s g major prelude, which also happens to be the most overplayed cello piece ever. it’s a simple piece yet, true to bach, carries this theme of creation ➝ fall ➝ redemption. it starts by setting the key, then introduces the tension that drags the piece to explore other keys, releases to the improvisation part, then returns to g major all glorious, made better for its journey. it’s not hard to see how this also functions as a metaphor for growth, i.e. childhood ➝ adolescence ➝ adulthood. that shinji plays only a fraction of it, and only the part that sets the key, is most likely due to time constraints (y’all wanna watch an anime, not a cello solo) but there’s something poetic in seeing this as a symbol for the many “failures to launch” in the ep, from shinji vis a vis gendo/yui to asuka’s stubborn obsession with kaji to misato, who says it herself: “i joined NERV to put all that behind me but there was also where my father worked.” each of them makes their failed bids to break free of old patterns only to return to their habitual ways of being, just like shinji with his made-up ending to bach’s actually awesome piece
in death, asuka’s violin solo is the gavotte en rondeau from bach’s partita 3 in e major. this is interesting cause the gavotte is a musical form that starts in the middle of the bar (say, the tempo’s 4/4, meaning there are four beats in each bar, the song starts on the 3rd instead of the 1st, like so). this is meant to create an upbeat tone and also true to asuka’s in medias res entrance. as with shinji, she doesn’t complete this piece
anno didn’t come up with komm susser tod. that was bach using a text by (now) anonymous author. while the eva’s version has become the theme song of our “life sucks just lemme die” gen, the original is more about a longing for heaven’s reward after life’s toils. it’s since been set to many variations. here’s my fave version as set by knut nystedt, true to the idea that music is the most temporal of the arts, as someone once said to me: “a chord is a glimpse into eternity”
there’s little point juxtaposing the lyrics of ode to joy to evangelion when it’s the context that matters. the finale to beethoven’s symphony 9 is a holiday song inextricable from war, which 10,000-strong japanese choirs sing to mark the new year’s by memorizing how the lyrics sound and not necessarily its meaning. it was the anthem of japanese nationalism in ww2 as its technical difficulty signaled their superiority over the rest of asia and their alignment with axis germany. it’s since been co-opted as a message of unity and brotherhood, but it can never shed its wartime burden. no doubt many japanese would still see in it a great deal of nationalistic pride (anno himself included)
trivia: technically most of the “classical” music in evangelion isn’t even classical but baroque (bach, pachelbel, handel). fittingly complex and polyphonic
notice any other examples? let me know. and please, actual musicologists out there, enlighten us.
