Kiki and Jiji

Program Notes

Kiki and Jiji (2023) came about from a conversation with Emily Ji, for whom I wrote the piece, about both careers and mental health—a conversation which, unexpectedly, turned to Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 animated film, Kiki's Delivery Service. I had only recently watched the film for the first time, and I was struck by the deeply-relatable lesson: what I assumed would be a cute story about a young witch (Kiki) and her talking cat (Jiji) turned out to be a film about how hard it is to find joy in your passions when you make them your profession. (Cuts deep!)

This arc—having a passion, something that feels energizing and fulfilling, which loses its shine when attached to the extractive necessities of income—describes the experience of so many artists, and Emily and I have both lived some version of this. Often, the arc of an artist stops cold because the process of “professionalizing” takes all of the curiosity and youthful spontaneity out of their art, and that’s difficult to rekindle. If we're intentional (and lucky,) we can sometimes find windows in that process to remind ourselves why we're doing what we're doing.

We set out to show that arc in music: beginning with ease and naïvete—slowly watching the process burden itself, become overcomplicated—then opening back up into ease and fluidity. In Kiki's Delivery Service, Miyazaki highlights the fact that, once we've lost the luster of youth, it's never exactly the same, but there are ways that we can return to joy and fulfillment, even if it's a new type of fulfillment. Kiki and Jiji is our way of saying: we're all trying to make it work out there, and it behooves us to take the time to remember and protect the kind of joy that drove us in the first place.