Who composed the music for Studio Ghibli's films?

Joe Hisaishi, born Mamoru Fujisawa, was recommended to Miyazaki by his record label in 1983, and the piano sketches he sent for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind so struck the director that Miyazaki kept the tapes on his desk and played them while he worked. He has scored every Miyazaki feature since except one, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya being Isao Takahata's film with its own composer, and the sound he built, orchestral warmth over minimalist repetition, with long stretches of deliberate silence, is simply what the name Ghibli sounds like. Other Ghibli films have other hands, Grave of the Fireflies is Michio Mamiya's, Whisper of the Heart is Yuji Nomi's, and Hisaishi himself is the first to draw that boundary.

The partnership also produced the best documented Japan and America music difference in the Library. The original 1986 Laputa carries about one hour of music in a film of two hours and four minutes, with silent stretches of seven or eight minutes that Japanese audiences took as natural. Preparing the English version in 1999, Hisaishi was told American viewers grow uncomfortable after three minutes without music, and he re-scored the film himself, composing a fuller, more continuous Hollywood style score for the same pictures. Kiki's Delivery Service travelled the other way in the same era, its music substantially altered for the English dub release. Same films, two national soundtracks, one composer signing both.

The scale of the afterlife matches the films'. In 2008 Hisaishi conducted the 25 year retrospective at the Tokyo Budokan: a 200 member orchestra, some 800 choir voices and a 160 piece marching band in a 14,000 seat hall, with Miyazaki himself appearing to say that meeting Hisaishi was among the great strokes of luck of his life. Game and film composers rarely get a hall like that. Ghibli's composer fills one with the music of a single partnership.