Who made the music for Evangelion?
Evangelion's principal composer is Shiro Sagisu, a veteran arranger and producer who had worked with Anno on Nadia and who scored the television series, The End of Evangelion and all four Rebuild films. His music mixes orchestra, choir, flamenco inflected guitar and quiet piano, and it is mixed into the series unusually prominently, often carrying scenes with little or no dialogue.
Layered over the original score is a deliberate classical programme. Beethoven's Ode to Joy scores the arrival of Kaworu, Bach and Handel appear at moments of judgement and revelation, and The End of Evangelion builds an entire sequence around Bach's Air on the G String. The borrowings are part of the work's method, using music the audience already associates with transcendence and then letting the images argue with it.
The songs are their own institution. The opening theme, A Cruel Angel's Thesis, sung by Yoko Takahashi with lyrics by Neko Oikawa, became one of the best known anime songs in Japan, a karaoke and pachinko staple that reached audiences who never watched the series. The end theme was Fly Me to the Moon, performed in rotating arrangements, whose licensing cost later removed it from streaming editions, a footnote that taught a generation of fans how fragile music rights can make a classic text.
On physical media, music is a collecting field of its own: Japanese soundtrack albums from King Records, including the numbered television soundtracks and the film scores, carry some of the most reproduced Evangelion artwork, and first issues often included bonus material that reissues dropped. Check catalogue numbers carefully, since the soundtrack line includes near identically titled volumes with different contents.
