How ‘Pachinko’ Uses Nico Muhly’s Score (and a Sad Trombone) to Reach Across Time
If the exquisite longing of Sunja (Minha Kim) and Hansu (Lee Min-ho) in “Pachinko” Season 2 are any guide, then anything can be a breakup track if it tries hard enough.
Kidding aside, one of the great pleasures of “Pachinko” is the extremely cinematic ways the show finds to propel the characters’ love for each other across time. That sense of a sustained feeling reaching across the generations is often visual, with slow dissolves across storylines that creator Soo Hugh likens to a pentimento — the art term for when the viewer can see discarded changes that hide underneath the surface of a painting.
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Behind every choice that Solomon (Jin Ha) makes in 1989, or every anxiety that Sunja swallows up in post-war Japan, there’s context ahead of or behind them; and for a moment, hanging between beautiful compositions, the editing of “Pachinko” lets us see those layers. But particularly in Season 2, there’s a lot of sonic connective tissue as well.
Hugh worked with composer Nico Muhly to grow the musical range of the series, mirroring how the world expands for Sunja’s children and the way her grandson, at least, claws to keep it as limitless as his Yale degree promised him it should be. The score isn’t bombastic or particularly orchestral — Hugh told IndieWire on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that “Pachinko” certainly didn’t have Hans Zimmer or John Williams-level resources — but it blends musical colors in such a way that we can feel the Baek family’s longing as the same, wherever it hits in time.
“We used so many strings in Season 1. The cello and the piano were such defining instruments,” Hugh told IndieWire. There was a concerted push for more brass and woodwinds, but they evolved in a particularly understated, elegant “Pachinko” way, never overpowering the string-heavy chamber vibe of the score but marking out key moments; in its embrace of little bits of dissonance, the score sonically portrays the emotional overlap between characters’ storylines and time periods.
“The shifts and the turns make the music feel emotional and also epic,” Hugh said. “A note can start, and then everything comes in and comes out, and he’s really willing to take risks in sound. At first you can hear something that’s jarring, and then we’ll play with it and he’ll twist it. And all of sudden, it becomes part of the language of the scene.”
One such example of a musical change that became part of the soul of a scene is the cue for Solomon and Naomi’s (Anna Sawai) breakup in “Chapter 14” of Season 2. Hugh said she needed a fair bit of convincing when Muhly pitched using a trombone as part of it. “I was like, ‘That is not a breakup instrument. What are you talking about?’” Hugh said.
But Muhly convinced her to let him try it. “And then there’s one moment when they’re talking, and you hear the wail of the trombone, and it is the saddest thing. It brought tears to my eyes just hearing that note. Nico knew it. He saw it,” Hugh said.
Even more heartbreaking is the way the scene is subtly divided into two parts. The first, which features Muhly’s score, has Solomon and Naomi discussing the personal rupture between them. The score retreats, along with the possibility of them being together, and Solomon presses for a professional favor that might destroy Naomi’s career, with just the sound of the rain in the background.
Every halting motion, every resigned look, every quiet word is so laced with unexpressed emotion that just that small hit of trombone and the constant patter of rain make the same impact as a big melodramatic swell or shouting match would in a different story. “I have to give Jin and Anna credit,” Hugh said. “They knew it doesn’t have to be this screaming fight to feel big.”
For all the ways “Pachinko” can make small things feel big, though, it’s equally affecting when they go for a big swing. And the show chooses to do this mostly sonically in its closing moments; Noa’s (Kang Tae-Ju) entry into the world of Pachinko parlors after leaving his family and his Hansu-controlled college career behind is backed by a mournful cover of “Viva La Vida” by South Korean singer Rosé. The song creates a similar emotional bridge between the past and the contemporary simply by being more contemporary in its sound. But it feels like a great capstone to “Pachinko” Season 2 in part because, as Hugh said, “The lyrics of that song really speak to Noa’s arc.”
This isn’t the first time that “Pachinko” has snuck in a 21st-century sound to cement a capstone moment for a character, but though the song itself always felt like the right message for Noa’s escape, it took a lot of trial and error to find the version that worked with the show.
“It’s similar to what we did in Season 1 with Neutral Milk Hotel. I’ve always loved Jeff Mangum’s voice, but it didn’t work in that scene in Season 1. And so Season 2, we tried the Coldplay version. It just didn’t work in that scene. Then, with Rosé, we actually did not know she had done that song before. We were like, ‘Would you like to try it?’” Hugh said. “It was so vulnerable, her delivery of that song, and it was just that magical moment with that scene.”
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