railway bitonality

My recent visit to Japan (the previous one was just before I started this blog) didn’t have a great deal of musical content, but I was able to observe again one feature of travel there: the use of distinctive melodies often associated with a particular route or station and played over the public address system. Many of them sound as if they could have been written by John Rutter. There are if anything now more of them than before. Indeed Nippori (a suburban station in Tokyo near where we were staying) appeared to have one in the station building and a different one out on the platform, with aurally chaotic results if both were played at the same time.