Granduncle's Tower (The Boy and the Heron)

"Granduncle's Tower" from The Boy and the Heron builds the film's central location into music of enigmatic majesty. The tower is a place outside ordinary time, and Hisaishi's music for it is correspondingly strange — modal harmonies that belong to no particular era, orchestration that layers acoustic warmth with uncanny space. There is grandeur here but it's eccentric grandeur, the size of something ancient and slightly wrong, an inheritance that cannot be used in the way the giver intended. The brass and woodwinds carry a quality of ceremony, the strings providing depth without quite resolving into comfort. Rhythmically the piece suggests the permanence of something that has stood for generations, the slow pulse of geological rather than human time. Within the film's structure the tower represents both possibility and danger — the capacity to create and the hubris embedded in that capacity. The music holds both valences simultaneously, refusing to resolve the ambiguity into either warning or invitation. A piece for contemplating large, inherited problems — the kind that arrived before you and will outlast any individual solution, but which nevertheless require you to stand before them and decide what to do.