#musical practice

[helpits4am]

Eat the burger they said. You’ll still be able to dance and exist without feeling like shit they said

[magicpotatothoughts]

REVIEW | My Thoughts on Kono Oto Tomare!

MENTIONS: Kono Oto Tomare 1st and 2nd season spoilers, Haikyuu Spoilers, musical analysis in an anime, treatment of music as a storytelling device and music as a non-diegetic device

I don't know why as a musician/composer, I have so many PTW music-themed anime but I always feel to some degree a bit too scared to start them. But somehow after coming across Kono Oto Tomare! on a funny anime moments compilation video on youtube, I decided to give this series a try. I was curious about this series because of a few reasons: 1) I saw a noticeable difference between MAL score for the first and second seasons 2) the art looked so clean and beautiful, similar to that Chihayafuru, one of my favourite josei series. I was so surprised to also find out that Kono Oto Tomare! was in fact labelled as shounen so I was curious as to see how a club-focused anime on a traditional instrument such as the koto would play out. After completing both seasons I have to say, I'm really glad I gave this series a go! But I do have quite a bit of mixed feelings around it. And I think partially that comes from my background in music. I want to talk about music in this anime as three separate things: 1) Music as a plot and thematic device, now be labelled as "Musical Practice" 2) Diegetic music any music that the characters play and hear that are the "Koto music" 3) Non-diegetic music that enhance the drama of the story that the characters can't hear which are the bgm "background music"

THEME - MUSICAL PRACTICE

Musical Practice in this anime is dealt with absolutely fantastically. To be honest, I was nervous for this anime because it is something quite complicated and might not able to be well-illustrated or explained to someone without formal musical training, but this anime actually does this quite well. Kono Oto Tomare! was able to cover quite complex issues such as: a) Teaching and Performing are different things b) trust between duet partners c) watching someone play and explaining music works differently for people (Chika is 100% a visual learner) d) Performance anxiety and how to overcome it e) Ensemble dynamics on and off-stage, how to recover on-stage f) cues (Houzuki giving a louder downbeat and Kouta helping everyone mentally recover g) the importance of focusing on polishing the basics and even one note h) difference between classical and modern repertoires i) difference between what judges value in competitions j) composition and arrangement and the relationship between the creator and performer h) roles within the ensemble and how to bring out the abilities of your other players I am so incredibly impressed at the vastness of issues that the managed to cover in a mere 26 episodes of 2 seasons. I think it was a huge feat that the mangaka/studio tried to incorporate all of that on top of trying to get the audience comfortable with the koto, which I presume alot of people actually won't know much about or even heard about. Tackling Musical Practice and especially one that is instrumental, rather than vocal (like in NANA), without words it's quite hard to explain music. I felt like they managed to explain the key aspects of musical playing and ensemble work quite well. Of course as a composer, I liked the focus on composition and arranging, I wished there was even more of a focus on that, I wished more music anime focused on the art of composition. I also really enjoyed their tackling of the Festival Arc performance, when someone makes a mistake, people spiralling and then them recovering mid-performance and it changes the mood of the performance. That's absolutely something that happens in real life and that Episode 13 Season 1 was really well written. Another highlight was when Touka couldn't understand the upbeats and the club advisor helped him (kinaesthetically) to remove a sticky-note. Changes in ways of teaching really changes the results of how well students receive the knowledge!

PLOT AND CHARACTER

Since the story is so inherently tied to character growth and dynamics, I think it's inevitable that I talk about these two categories together. This is also the section of the blog where my feelings for this anime gets a bit murky. Once again, I wanted to say, I think it's really interesting just how much character development they tried to pack into 26 episodes. Not only did we get background and flashbacks on all of our main characters but also our rival school teams as well as the the teachers and I really liked the consistent highlight of the relationship between the elderly and the youth. It's really adorable that the old grandma and Chika's grandpa made constant appearances and definitely are shown to have had a huge positive impact on Chika and the other characters. I think it's really refreshing to see that in an anime, especially also when dealing with a traditional instrument such as the Koto, the threads between historical and modern worlds are strongly tied. I also enjoyed the foil of Houzuki and Akira, both were in a way rivals to begin with but they were equally sustaining pressures from the older generation and music became less fun. As a musician, I really related to that. I did absolutely adore about the anime are: a) the humour moments between the characters b) THANK GOODNESS, no fan-service! c) The amazing amount of focus on the female characters. I loved the focus on all the main female leads and their struggles. This is why even after watching it, it felt so much like a Josei anime to me. d) the show has amazing dialogue and quotes that were extremely profound and actually However, the focus on the sheer LARGE number of characters and their growth was certainly, at least in my opinion, a double-edged sword for Kono Oto Tomare! Each of the character's focus/flashbacks are episodic and in some ways, heart-felt moments are glossed over too quickly while some moments felt too dramaticised....A whole 10 minutes dedicated to flashbacks feel really off. It maybe got slightly better in the second season but generally speaking, this vast focus on many characters made me feel like I was playing a role-playing game like Uta no☆Prince-sama♪ because there was character growth don't get me wrong, they feel interrupted or could have slowly been revealed over several episodes. I don't know if the studio was trying to take an approach similar to Haikyuu!!, but I think the reason why Haikyuu works well in the later seasons by episodically focusing on the other characters is because the other teams are well assigned in a prescribed role on the court, there are already pre-established lovable foils of them in the Kurasuno team. This is why I think the audience loves them straight away and that small episodic flashback enhances the love that we already feel for them while also highlighting the small quirks that makes them unique. Take Atsumu and Osumu, immediately looking at them for two seconds, their competitiveness feel akeen to Hinata and Kageyama's. Kono Oto Tomare! doesn't quite work because in ensembles, roles change as with each piece and the characters in the rival schools are incredibly different from our Tokise High School. But that's not to say they weren't cool characters, they were, but I wished the studio were more selective about which characters to focus on and TAKE THEIR TIME in allowing us as the audience to form a genuine and strong bond with our characters.

MUSIC

Another incredibly murky category. The thing that frustrates me about this anime is that there are things that are done SO INCREDIBLY WELL and then there are things that are subpar in comparison. The Koto Music in this anime is absolutely stunning. I know nothing about koto music or the instrument.Every single koto piece that was showcased in this anime was so beautiful. It was such a delight for me to find out that actually Migiwa Hashimoto, the sister of the mangaka actually wrote Tenkyu and some of the other pieces. At first, I didn't really care for Tenkyu when I heard the opening, but the arrangement, despite it being similar to a 4-chord modern song, is actually quite complicated and beautiful. I was incredibly impressed at how touching that piece is. I very much enjoyed the wealth of repertoires from the other schools as well as Tenkyu's transformation from a 'desperate scream' into a 'warm-cry'. I loved how each time, I could hear the Koto club levelling up in their skill-level in each subsequent repertoire that they performed.

HOWEVER, the background music....especially for a music anime....was mediocre to say the least and the treatment of it was so disappointing at its worst. I don't really like any of the OP and ED themes, I enjoyed the cool Koto arrangement of the first OP theme and that's it. BUT, the biggest let-down isn't the background music itself, it's the poor placement, editing and directing of the music. Firstly, background music was playing at least 95% of the time. The overuse of music means that the audience don't have enough time to gather their own emotions. Emotions are prescribed to them and they can distract from the wonderful dialogue that we actually have in the show. Secondly, the background music feels like it came straight out of a music library and transitions weren't carefully considered at all. Take for example, in certain scenes, Chika would say something profound that was heartwarming for another character and then all of a sudden it was back to humour but there is literally no fade or anything sort of harmonic transition that made the background music in this anime cohesive at all. But take Made in Abyss where the background music is seamlessly weaved together and the transition from creeping dread to devastating dread is gorgeously illustrated. Or take any episode of Natsume's Book of Friends and listen to how seamless the final piano track melts into the ED credits of each episode. Natsume doesn't even have a mindblowing ost at all but you can definitely tell that the music editting was carefully considered to allow emotions to be paced well and flow comfortably from one scene to another. Kono Oto Tomare! made me disappointed in the music department because for a music-themed anime, I guess my expectations were set higher than most anime when listening out for the music and I feel so conflicted because the standards between the Koto music and the background music are worlds apart. Voice acting was good! I didn't have much to comment about it! I think the female voice actors portrayed the females really well, especially Houzoki slowly becoming less cold and warmer.

ANIMATION

Art style is really clean and beautiful! The colours and really soft and pleasant on the eyes, which is another reason why I thought this anime was josei or shoujo! It kind of makes me wonder why we have these categories in the first place for club-themed/passion-themed animes, I think we shouldn't categorise them based on gendered demographic since they are really similar! So much of the anime kind of reminded of other anime, which I guess is not a good thing or a bad thing, like I think that's why in the first place it sort of drew me to watching the anime. Like the three idiots in this anime reminded of of the three idiots in Maid Sama, some of the character designs reminded of Your Lie in April. However, I feel like the character designs were a bit plain, I wished there were something small aesthetically about them that were added to make them stand out from all the other school-based anime.

The three idiots from this anime and Maid Sama

Kurata and Kazusa from this anime and Your Lie in April MC

I don't know the budget for this anime but I can 100% tell that the studio spent all their budget on Ep 5, Ep 13 S1 and Ep 12 of S2, which are all the main Koto Performances sequences. The animation of the Koto performances are absolutely breathtaking, the camera angles, the smoothness of the hand movements, the vibration of the strings, the body movements of the players, the visualisations of the notes and the score, everything is superbly done. So therefore, it saddens me to say that therefore the other episodes just felt a bit underwhelming because there was a lot of still-pan shots. But I think they got away with a lot of it because of how pretty the colours and the clean look of the art-style is. I wished, and this is in relation to the story, music and animation categories, that they just showed the rehearsal koto pieces for a bit longer. This is what I noticed a lot with other "arts/sports-related" anime, (I also gave Welcome to the Ballroom this feedback) that because I think the studios are scared that showing us the final product multiple times because they think that multiple showings could lose our reaction to the final stage performance, we get like literally 1 second snapshots of characters rehearsing the piece or demonstrating a piece in rehearsals. I don't think so! Academic research shows that familiarity of a piece/work through repetition actually enhances how much we like a work! I don't think they needed to show an entire performance, but literally we got max 10 seconds of a piece during rehearsals and that's simply not enough. An anime I think that does this well to show the evolution of a work improving is Yuri!! on Ice where we see a few repetitions of the same work, Eros, first danced by Victor, then subtle improvements from Yuri as the series progresses. I think that was so superbly well done and one of the most memorable performances according to that anime's fandom. Kono Oto Tomare! is such an interesting anime because I don't think a music anime has really made me think this hard about 'music' in an anime before and how it's treated and utilised or how it's addressed as a story device. All in all, I am really glad I watched it and i want to commend on Platinum Vision for giving this a really good crack! I am aware that this studio has only been operating for 5 years (3 if you consider when this anime was released!) and they decided to take many risks with this anime, they tried to pack so much into 26 episodes. Also LOVE the amount of FEMALE development in this anime! This studio has a lot of potential! I will be expecting a lot more from them in the coming years and I know that they will get up there with the big names like Madhouse and Kyoto Animation and create some truly amazing works!

Final Score: 🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔/10

[hezigler]

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Watch "The Mathematical Problem with Music, and How to Solve It" on YouTube

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Choosing a Saxophone Mouthpiece | Howarth of London

Choosing a Saxophone Mouthpiece

The mouthpiece of a Saxophone, be it Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone or more, is the most customisable part of the instrument; a variable per

Periodically, I suffer bouts of Mouthpiece & Reed disease. Many younger saxophonists experience this condition frequently. Symptoms vary in severity, including dissatisfaction with ones tone quality, intonation, and physical ease of playing. It can be expensive as mouthpieces can range in price from tens of dollars for a student model to hundreds of dollars and more for a professional model. This article is an excellent review of the basics of saxophone mouthpiece design and a good cursory review of some of the top brands of mouthpiece manufacturers.

[hezigler]

Watch "Get Better At Music By Practicing Less" on YouTube

Practic better, not necessarily more.