Speakers
Ivan Tan
Ivan Tan is Visiting Lecturer in Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses in music theory, musicianship, and songwriting. His research on popular music and music cognition has been published in Music Perception and Psychology of Music, and presented at international, national, and regional conferences. Ivan is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the Eastman School of Music, where his dissertation research investigates issues of virtuosity, texture, and groove in 1970s progressive rock keyboard performance. He also holds degrees from Brown University and Purchase College (SUNY) in applied mathematics and piano performance.
“…to be continued”: Progressive Rock and Phantom Blood
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Ivan Tan
The manga Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, as well as its anime adaptation, is well known for its constant referencing of Western popular music. Notably, creator Hirohiko Araki named many characters after his favorite bands and songs, initially focused on 1960s and 1970s classic and progressive rock—with characters like “Tarkus,” “Bruford,” and “Robert E.O. Speedwagon”—before expanding to more recent genres as the manga has progressed. Araki’s appreciation for Western popular music has manifested in other ways in both the manga and the anime: the over-the-top character designs that vary from issue to issue have been compared to David Bowie’s flamboyant aesthetic, while the end credits for the first season of the anime, Phantom Blood, prominently feature Yes’ “Roundabout.”
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In this paper, I focus on the influence of progressive rock in Hayato Matsuo’s soundtrack to the Phantom Blood anime. Initially a straightforward-seeming Victorian family drama explicitly set in late 19th century England, Phantom Blood expands into an action-oriented adventure in which the protagonist (Jonathan Joestar) must manifest supernatural abilities to fight a host of zombies and vampires. Likewise, and in contrast to the more rock-oriented soundtracks from Season 2 onwards, the Phantom Blood soundtrack begins with traditionally scored material suggesting the style of late-Romantic English composers, yet includes tracks more suggestive of both progressive rock and video game music in later episodes, reflecting not only plot developments but also Matsuo’s career as a video game composer and his appreciation of bands like ELP and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Interestingly, these disparate idiolects are not synthesized until the end of the season, suggesting a general aesthetic closer to the surface-level, “cinema of attractions” proposed by Eric Hung in his analysis of ELP’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
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Keywords: film/multimedia, soundtrack, genre