Turning "We won't give up until that first cry rings out" into music
TV drama scoring gets talked about far less than anime or film music. It plays in living rooms every week, yet so much of it vanishes without ever being pressed to disc. That's exactly why it makes me happy just to see a broadcast drama's original soundtrack properly released as a CD. The original soundtrack for Nippon TV's Wednesday drama First Cry: Maternal and Child Emergency Rescue Team arrives on September 9, 2026 from VAP (cat. no. VPCD-87344 / 2,750 yen incl. tax / 26 tracks). The music is by Yugo Kanno.
The story unfolds at an ultra-prestigious "celebrity hospital" in the heart of Tokyo, where a secret "Maternal and Child Emergency Rescue Team," formed on the director's private orders, saves at-risk pregnant women who have nowhere else to turn, free of charge. What makes the show sturdy is that it tackles Japan's very real maternity crisis head-on: falling birth rates, doctor shortages, regional obstetric wards shutting down. And what truly grabs you is the protagonist, OB-GYN Aki Mitsui, drawn as a specialist who, despite hearing loss in one ear, is more determined than anyone to hear a baby's first cry. A doctor for whom sound is hard to reach, going out of her way to catch a new life's very first voice — that single detail changes the weight the score has to carry.
Anime, a taiga epic, symphonies — Kanno the boundary-crosser
Casting Kanno for this material makes perfect sense. Born in 1977, a composition graduate of Tokyo College of Music, he debuted as a composer with the 2004 drama Last Christmas, and his filmography since is astonishingly broad. He made his name with the coolly intellectual theme for the drama Galileo, delivered the tense, chilly score for the dystopian sci-fi anime PSYCHO-PASS, and took on "national-scale" runtimes with NHK's taiga drama Gunshi Kanbei (2014) and the morning serial Half Blue Sky (2018).
Just as notable is that he's a genuine concert-hall composer too. His Symphony No. 1 "The Border" was premiered in 2016 and Symphony No. 2 "Alles ist Architektur" in 2019, both by the Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra. In other words, Kanno is both a craftsman who fits music to the second on the TV clock and a writer who can architect a symphony spanning tens of minutes. That boundary-crossing is his weapon, and in an emotionally volatile genre like the medical drama, both engines mesh beautifully — opening the orchestra wide for a decisive delivery scene, then folding it back to chamber intimacy for everyday ward life. That sense of proportion is always there in his scores.
26 tracks that map the front line of life
This soundtrack runs 26 tracks, and just reading the titles tells you the drama's body temperature. It opens with "First Cry: Maternal and Child Emergency Rescue Team," then lines up titles that read like the team's creed — "We Won't Give Up on This Moment," "Until the First Cry Rings Out," "A Mother and Child's Life." But mixed in are wonderfully human, slightly funny cuts like "Cheers!!," "The Type Who Gets Dragged In," and "Kind of Annoying?" That push-and-pull matters. A medical story can't survive on tension alone; because the music shoulders the small humor and slack outside the exam room, the moments when a life is about to slip away hit that much harder.
What I'd flag especially are the piano versions placed near the end — "A Mother and Child's Life ~Pf~" and "First Cry ~Pf~." Presenting the main theme twice in different scoring is Kanno's familiar "theme and variation" move: a motif that rang out grandly with full forces is quietly refolded at the end by a single piano. If the full orchestra means "a life we all protect," the piano may be the view that leans in on "one mother, one child." And consider the ache in a title like "I Want to Meet the Baby…." When that title resonates with the story's core — a one-eared doctor chasing a first cry — the soundtrack stops being a mere cue collection and becomes something you can listen to as a single narrative.
A drama score being gathered onto one official disc is proof that the music was recognized as a "work," not just "BGM that vanishes each week." On September 9, we finally get to sit in front of the speakers and listen to Kanno's "until the first cry rings out" to our heart's content. How did the music support — and turn into hope — such heavy themes as the birthrate crisis and the maternity front line? Whether you followed the broadcast or are catching up via streaming, pick up the soundtrack as a kind of map and look back through it.
