Work and school continue on and the double-life persists, but unlike before, I can be a student for an entire day, and a web developer for an entire day, alternating days. And I also have Fridays off. I the word "off" loosely, as it usually implies I spend the time on whatever needs to be done, be it homework, freelance work, music composition, or collaborating with other artists.
Speaking of which. There have been a sudden influx of wedding gigs for Solaris Piano Trio all summer this year. Either it is a good year to get married, or we suddenly promoted ourselves really well. A couple of months ago, I designed some business cards for each member of the trio and we've been handing them out sporadically at gigs. People have responded positively to the business cards, so I guess I did a pretty good job then.
We played through the Overture and Gavotte I of my latest composition, Orchestral Suite No. 1, yesterday night and it was pretty smooth-sailing, with very few rhythm issues. Some of the rhythms were a bit troublesome, but in all, I'd say I am pretty pleased with the way it turned out. So far I've been approached by 4 people showing interest for the solo parts. Can't wait to hear the whole thing! As usual, our fall semester concert will take place in December. We are still deciding on the exact date, which will either be on the first or the second of the month. So stay tuned!
So thought I’d just do an update since I haven’t posted any videos in ages. My schedule for the past few months has been pretty routine. In short, it’s sort of part-time work with part-time school. I use the term “part-time” loosely, because sometimes my weekly work hours sometimes totals to be something close to the number of hours a full-time employee would be doing. It’s weird being both a student and an employee at the same time because I constantly find myself in a dilemma when deciding which one takes priority. And this is especially tricky since the one course that I am taking is pretty much all group work. Heh.
The SFU Chamber Orchestra is still going strong this summer, which is something new, since we usually take a hiatus and make our return in the Fall. This summer, we’re playing a variety of pieces including:
Concerto Grosso No. 10 in b minor, by Vivaldi
Memory of the Wind ~Legend of the Eternal Wind~, by Nobuo Uematsu, re-arranged by Tsuyoshi Sekito, and re-rearranged by Me!
One Summer's Day, by Joe Hisashi
Most of our repertoire requires substantial substitution by other instruments, since our ensemble is a bit smaller than it is usually. My arrangement of Memory of the Wind ~Legend of the Eternal Wind~ was composed strictly for our current ensemble, so there were some interesting challenges to overcome and redistribution of soloists to make things work. Our set-up is roughly like this:
2 flutes
2 clarinets
1 horn
1 piano
6 violins
1 cello
For example, a solo line that was originally for trumpet was given to the clarinets in the arrangement, or something like that. We will be premiering this work and the concerto at the end of July in an out-doors talent show run by the university. Stay tuned!
Hello my loyal readers, in case any of your are wondering where I’ve disappeared to, I am still alive, but just swamped with work over the past several weeks. Looks like I won’t be getting full marks for the blogging part of the grade (haha). One of the things that has been consuming my time is my music composition graduation project. I have been working on composing a 12-minute piece for string trio (that’s violin, viola, and cello). The work will be programmed into a graduation concert in December. Much of my time was spent on editing the scores and having them read through by professionals in class—in all, quite an awesome learning experience.
Now, for those wondering what I am up to with my piano arrangement work, here is a teaser list of upcoming works/piano arrangements:
Organ Trio Sonata No. 3, III. Vivace—J.S. Bach
Kimi No Iru Kara—Final Fantasy XIII
Memory of the Wind: Legend of the Eternal Wind—Final Fantasy III
In my last post, I mentioned that I will be arranging the third movement from Bach’s Organ Trio Sonata III for solo piano. Here is a sneak peak of my progress so far:
Fig. 1. First 8 bars of my piano arrangement of BWV 527.
Fig. 1. First 14 bars of BWV 527, Johann Sebastian Bach.
There isn’t much to see yet, but there are some interesting issues I would like to address. The first thing you might notice is that the bass line has been transposed down an octave. At first, it seemed like an arbitrary decision, but upon repeated listenings, I realize the pedalboard notes sound an octave lower than written anyway, so it appears to be a reasonable choice.
Interestingly, at a few points later on in the piece, the upper two voices diverge such that they are unplayable using the right hand alone. Sometimes, I overcome this by transposing the left hand an octave up (or it finds its way to that register some how) and then it is able to play both the pedalboard notes and some of the middle voice. There are times when the playability of the arrangement “hangs on by a thread” but in general, I would say it is playable.
Lately, I have been receiving the following question a lot on YouTube:
How do you make this?
The question refers to a genre of videos I refer to as "score videos" (see Vid. 1.). In the most general sense, a score video is a slide show comprised of screen captures of digital representations of organized music notation accompanied by a computer-generated audio track that is loosely synchronized with what notation is being displayed on the viewable area at any given time.
Vid. 1. Score video of my original piano arrangement of Silence and Motion, a piece of incidental music composed by Nobuo Uematsu for the game Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation).
Creating a score video takes many steps. The entire process can take anywhere from a few hours to several days, depending on many factors such as my interest in the project how much time I have. While the order given below is not fixed it describes one of the possible work flows.
Conceptualize
You can't make a score video without a score (haha). So that first step is to compose the darn thing. There are several ways I go about this. I may:
improvise at the piano and come up with something that I think has potential for a composition;
come up with something in my head on the bus on the way to work; or
decide to arrange a piece of existing music that is not for solo piano for solo piano.
Composing and outputting a score
When people talk about composing a piece of music, we may imagine the idea of a composer improvising at the piano and jotting down ideas on paper with a pencil. Or if music notation is not your thing, you may prefer to memorize the general chord structure of your composition and recall it from memory when it is time to share it with others. Anyway, why am I saying all this? One of my key points in this section is that the definition of the act of composing a work is not well defined. It varies among different composers from different backgrounds. Composing, to me, then, is the combined act of conceptualizing and notating ones musical composition in its most clear form and in as much detail as necessary to communicate the composer's intent.
Using my own definition of composing music from above, the first step in the process, then, is to conceptualize musical ideas and then to notate and organize them using a musical notation software, such as Sibelius. This includes notating details such as phrasing, articulations, dynamics, etc. Once you are satisfied with the layout of everything, you are ready to output the composition as a score. (At this point, the work flow diverges and becomes non-linear). What I do is first save the score as a PDF and then manipulate it later. I use a printer driver called CutePDF, which allows you to save any printable output as a PDF. PDFs are quite handy in that, unlike editable files such as Word documents, everything is locked in place, and all fonts are automatically embedded, so you don't have to worry about sharing files with people who may not have your fonts.
(The following is an aside.) Being a classically-trained musician, music notation is something I hold to a high regard. It is a means of universal communication. In the most general sense, music notation is a means of communicating musical ideas to others without having to perform the piece. It is quite useful for the sake of musical analysis. What I am about to say may not be well received, especially by composers of contemporary music, but it is a belief that forms the basis of my philosophy on music composition. I feel that in order for a composer to call something his own composition, he has to be able to preserve it in one way or the other, whether it means to be able to perform it more than once, or to keep a record of the work by notating it. Now, whether this is accurate is for a different discussion, but it is definitely an important point worth mentioning.
Cut and splice the score
Since we are uploading our score video up on YouTube, the pre-defined video dimensions put forth by YouTube will be the constraints on how we can optimize our screen captures. Generally speaking, we want to display as much notation on a screen with a height:width ratio of 16:9. (There are other constraints and aesthetic decisions that come later on.) Now the PDF we have generated was probably optimized for letter-sized printing (8.5 inches by 11 inches) so we have to render, scale and crop.
So I open up the PDF page-by-page in Photoshop, starting with the first page. Since Photoshop deals with raster graphics, which is the format we will be using, we need to first render the vector graphics as bitmaps. Keeping the original dimensions (8.5 inches by 11 inches) I set the DPI (or PPI) to 300, as it will produce a bitmap that is not too large or too small to work with (I think this was an arbitrary decision on my part). So keeping with the constraint that all screen captures must be optimized for a 16:9 screen, I cut the bitmap into smaller bitmaps, which I refer to as “views.” (In fact, I even name the these bitmaps as “view01.bmp”, “view02.bmp”, etc.) Since each screen capture may contain a different number of systems, the page breaks of the original PDF may not always coincide with a (for the lack of a better word) “screen-capture break.” So you may have to splice together two systems from adjacent pages.
Free-floating elements that are not time dependent, such as the (i) title and credits; copyright info (ii); and (iii) footnotes are handled separately. The title and credits I usually include on the first view, above the first system. Copyright info, which generally appears on the first page of the PDF, is moved onto the last view of the slide show. Similarly, footnotes that appear at the bottom of a page in the PDF are moved to the bottom of the screen on which the reference now resides.
This step is pretty much reflowing your PDF document for a format where pages have the dimensions 16:9, sort of like a music book in landscape orientation, with very large print. On a more aesthetic note (pun intended!) you may prefer to display the same number of systems on a each page, or follow some sort of convention that you put forth. Interestingly, because we have reflowed the document, our repetition points have also moved around, so a start-repeat barline that appeared at the top of a page in the PDF may well appear on the second system of a view. When we put together the slide show later on, it may be confusing to the viewer who is trying to find his place on the screen following a jump due to an end-repeat barline.
So what we will have is a collection of views optimized for a slide show that will be uploaded to YouTube.
Audio production
The most obvious way would be, perhaps, to audio record yourself or an ensemble performing the music, maybe recording studio or something to that effect. This is a lengthy process, and depending on what resources you have, it can also be quite costly. So instead, what I do is output an audio file using Sibelius, directly. But before we do so, we have to tweak the performance so that it sounds less mechanical.
One of the things I love about Sibelius is it supports sample libraries, so you can preview your work as you go with pre-sampled sounds on the fly. The stuff you notate in Sibelius is stored as MIDI instructions. A single note has properties such as pitch, duration, and even articulation. However, the audio generated by Sibelius is not perfect (perfect in the sense that it captures your intended ideal performance). Maybe a note will be too loud. Maybe you want manually control the rubato (natural variation in tempo to express emotion). So we have to tweak it. Sibelius facilitates this using its “dictionary” mechanism, a collection of keywords that automatically apply or remove audio effects. For example, if you want a particular section of your composition to be played using the pizzicato technique, all you need to do is simply enter pizz. or pizzicato on your score and attach it to the note at the point at which you would like the technique to be applied. To end the usage of the technique, you might do the same at a later point but using the indication arco or norm. These keywords are stored in the dictionary. Basically, if Sibelius comes across a keyword in your score, the proper audio effect will be applied.
So this step is basically doing the above for every instance where you want to breathe some life into your computer-generated audio. For me, it is generally one of the most time-consuming steps of the process. When you have previewed the audio in Sibelius and are more or less satisfied with the results, it is time to output the audio. Currently, for this purpose, Sibelius can only export WAV files, but that is good, because we want high-quality media. When the final product is uploaded to YouTube, there will be some degree of compression, so the more detail we have, the better! Once you have outputted the WAV file, if you like, you may want to edit it further using audio editing tools. I use a software called Audacity. Sometimes the audio isn't loud enough, so I use a feature called “compress” which amplifies the entire waveform such that the highest point in the waveform is the maximum and prevents peaking.
Putting it all together
Just to summarize, this is all the usable media we have at this point:
a collection of slide show views (bitmap files); and
a computer-generated audio representation of your composition (WAV file).
Now what want to do is put together a slideshow that synchronizes your audio with your collection of slide show views. The software I use for this step is
(drum roll please ...)
Windows Movie Maker. Appalled? I am sure there are far more efficient methods of doing what I do, but I have used Windows Movie Maker for quite some time, and I suppose I have gotten used to the work flow.
This step is probably the most straightforward of them all. First, I import all my usable media into the “collections” interface. I then place the audio onto the time line. And then one by one, I place the slide show views onto the visual track of the time line, adjusting the viewing durations as necessary. From my experience in my early days of doing score videos, when a video gets uploaded to YouTube, the audio and visual lose some degree of synchronicity part way into the video, so for this reason, fading between views is a good idea as it gives the viewer time to direct his vision to the correct location on the next screen as it comes into view.
This concludes my explanation of the entire score video process. I hope it has been insightful and inspiring in some way. (If you are still reading, I assume that is true to some extent.) Please feel free to leave a comment or question. I am always up for discussion.
This is part II of Why I write fugues. Part I is a discussion on compositional techniques and methods, which you may find interesting if you are into composing fugues.
Its potential for cross-genre innovation
Fugue has its roots in improvisation. The notion of contrapuntal writing developed from polyphonic exercises in the Renaissance Era (ca. 1400 – 1600) that helped plan out a basis for improvisation. Eventually, the fugue became recognized as a distinct texture on its own and rose to its prominence in the Baroque Era (ca. 1600 – 1760) notably with the music of Bach. Fugues were often based on pre-existing material or musical cryptograms using a variety of encodings.
Vid. 1. Video recording of the fugue from Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel (Op. 24) by Brahms. Pf. Andre-Michel Schub.
Contrapuntal writing based on pre-existing material allowed composers to give their music an additional dimension. Typically, the pre-existing material would be a melody or a fragment of a melody from another source, such as a hymn, a folk song, or a piece of music. The fugue from Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel is an example of such a work from the Romantic Era (ca. 1815 – 1910).
Musical cryptograms are a way of correlating written language to musical pitch classes. Notable examples are:
the BACH motif (from J.S. Bach): B flat, A, C, B natural; and
the DSCH motif (from D. Shostakovitch): D, E flat, C, B natural.
(In German music conventions, B-flat is represented as B and B natural is represented as H.)
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Fast forward to modern day, a world dominated by computers, mass media, and popular culture. While “classical music” (art music) still has a prominent presence in art and culture, it is less accessible to the public, and therefore not as well understood, compared to popular music.
The fugue is now a thing of the past, but I feel that shouldn’t be the way it is. In Part I of Why I write fugues, I had talked about how I appreciate the art of fugue writing as a fascinating puzzle. It is an engaging challenge that leads to the revelation of things that were once not obvious to the composer. And in turn, the composer learns more about himself through this process. That is why I believe that the fugue form is important and should be brought back to some degree of prominence. That is what I hope to achieve through my work on YouTube.
I didn’t start posting score videos until some time in 2008. (“Score video” is a term I made up to describe a slideshow of sheet music synchronized with music playing in the background.) My first upload of this kind was my piano solo arrangement of Lilium, the opening theme song from the anime Elfen Lied. I composed the arrangement in response to all the positive feedback I was receiving from my Lilium improvisation video. Soon after, my first score video received lots of comments and views, which gave me an idea.
Vid. 2. Score video for Nokia Fugue (Op. 31), an original composition.
Seeing that people liked the idea of score videos, I thought I’d make some more to see where it would lead me. But anime music, while popular with selected audiences, still does not compare to the popularity of pop culture. Then I thought of cell phones and started sketching out the beginnings of what would later become the the Nokia Fugue (Op. 31).
From that point on, I realized that the fugue form (and canons) was a link between art music and pop culture. By writing fugues that incorporated elements from pop culture, I could speak to a broader audience and raise awareness of this art form to audiences that otherwise would not have been aware. Later on, My YouTube subscriber count rose quickly after the user smalin, who is known for his visually appealing music animation videos, animated the Nokia Fugue.
Vid. 3. Score video for Fugue for Sycra (Op. 35), an original composition.
In November 2009, I composed Fugue for Sycra (Op. 35). Extending the idea of musical cryptogram into the 21st century, I came upon the idea of writing a fugue loosely based on the letters of a friend’s YouTube username. As mentioned previously, there are many methods of encoding letters to pitch classes. Being the case that I do not speak fluent German, I decided to go with the “French” method of the musical cryptogram, which basically encodes the first seven letters of the alphabet as expected, and then the rest of the letters are encoded to their corresponding pitch class given in the top row of the following table:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Tbl. 1. French musical cryptogram encoding scheme.
I say this is an extension of the traditional cryptogram-based fugue because it is based on a username as opposed to an actual name. It is essentially an adaptation of traditional methods to the modern world of technology.
By writing fugues using pre-existing melodies and motifs from pop culture, I can combine my appreciation for the fugue with something to which the general public can relate. With time, I hope that more and more people can appreciate the beauty of the fugue along with its complex compositional techniques.
For those visitors of my website, Audiomuse, you may have noticed that the last blog post was written nearly half a year ago all the way back in August of 2009. I had mentioned that I was going to blog more often, and write interesting articles on certain music-related topics, but yet again, I have not kept my word. For that, I apologize. “Why,” you ask, “am I posting now all of a sudden?” Well, due to some interesting circumstances, I now have an incentive to blog; one of my university courses requires me to keep a regular blog, so I thought: What better opportunity to write articles on topics of personal interest without feeling guilty of procrastinating than this one?
(Before I begin, note that this article assumes of the reader some general knowledge in music terminology and fugue. However, I will try my best to express my ideas in a way that the material will make an interesting read for any audience.)
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The fugue form has always been a great interest to me, ever since encountering my first Bach fugue in my teen years. Two things I find interesting about the fugue form are:
the systematic approach and recursive nature of fugue writing
its potential for cross-genre innovation.
(I will talk about the first point in this post and save the second point for a later time.)
The systematic approach and recursive nature of fugue writing
While I have studied counterpoint (adj.contrapuntal) several years ago, I admit that I have forgotten many of the rules. (Counterpoint is a technique of polyphonic writing, in which two or more voices maintain interdependence in harmonic structure and independence in rhythm and melodic contour.) While I still adhere to things such as proper voice leading, priority in note doubling, and the avoidance of parallel fifths and octaves (those are the main ones that I can recall off the top of my head), much of what I write is based on what I think “sounds good.” In some ways, this can be a good thing, because it allows me to focus more on the actual composition than to be bogged down by rules. I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I am conscious of the rules of strict counterpoint, I am also conscious about musicality. Having said all that, I think it’s time to delve into the composition process.
Fugue writing is definitely a systematic process. In most cases, fugues are based on a single melodic idea, known as the subject, that is complete on its own. The subject serves as a starting point for the rest of the composition.
In addition to the subject, one may choose to also incorporate a countersubject. (A countersubject is another subject that is regularly, but not necessarily always, heard with the main subject. If the countersubject is featured prominently enough and treated like the main subject, it can be considered as a second subject, and the fugue is then referred to as a double fugue.) The countersubject is often tested for invertibility, that is, its ability to be contrapuntally logical when heard above the subject and heard below the subject (Fig. 1). I generally try to work in a good invertible countersubject, but sometimes it is not possible because of the intervallic constraints with the main subject. In this situation, I will either choose to modify it or to keep the main subject as it is because it just “sounds good.”
Fig. 1. Excerpt from Fugue for Sycra (Op. 35), an original piano solo, showing various elements in the exposition of a fugue. The fugue subject makes its first appearance in mm. 1 – 2. Then the countersubject appears in the middle voice (mm. 3 – 4) and again in the top voice (mm. 6 – 8) demonstrating invertibility when heard together with the fugue subject.
If one wishes to compose a “stretto fugue” he or she may choose to plan the subject such that it is possible to be heard in canon with itself in one or more ways. (Canon refers to a style of polyphonic composition where one or more voices strictly imitate the first voice at some interval, usually diatonic, and at some delayed duration, while still maintaining harmonic sense. Stretto, then, refers to the canon texture within a fugue composition.)
Fig. 2. Excerpt from Fugue for Sycra (Op. 35), showing an example of stretto in mm. 12 – 13 between the upper voice (leader) and the middle voice (follower).
This can be a frustrating experience, but once a stretto is established, it can be used over and over again to one’s heart’s content. The stretto may appear later on in various configurations. Either the leader or the follower may be above the other, and additional voices may be oriented to be above or below a voice. (Some configurations may not be possible due to excessive voice overlapping and other contrapuntal constraints.) I find the notion of stretto to be very fascinating because of its property of being strictly self-referential.
So far, I have briefly talked about two fugal features: the countersubject and the stretto. As you can see, both are closely related to the composition as a whole. I typically choose to focus on one feature more than the other, simply because it would be too time consuming to consciously integrate several features simultaneously. Because of this, my fugues usually have either a highly-developed stretto basis and a less-developed countersubject or vice versa.
From these observations, I perceive the process of fugue writing as a puzzle, where the composer discovers more and more as he progresses. It is like a puzzle in many regards:
Contrapuntal devices are closely and firmly integrated, and so, there is a great deal of recursive dependency.
Contrapuntal devices develop simultaneously as the composer writes the fugue, which makes fugue-writing suspensful and full of surprises.
Harmonic relationships are not always apparent at first glance, so there is much trial and error involved.
The idea of a puzzle is even more apparent when the fugue subject is based on pre-existing material (such as references to popular culture) which I will be discussing in depth in my next segment.
I will leave it at that for today. In my next post, I will be discussing the notion of cross-genre innovation and how I relate this to the fugue.
This post is half tutorial and half discussion, but the main focus is on discussion. It is about problems in expressing music effectively using music notation. Basically, I want to start an open discussion on these issues and hear what views people have.
As a piano composer and enthusiast of music notation, I am often faced with a struggle between these two extremes:
Expressing music in the cleanest way possible.
Showing as much detail as possible.
The first extreme involves the ease of reading of the notation. To express this in the form of a question: Which decisions can I make so that the notation is uncluttered and easy to read for the performer? Meaningful elements such as slurs, articulations, and pedal markings are often included in a score to guide the reader to more closely understand the composer's intentions, but in some cases this can possibly hinder the reading of the music. On the other hand, showing only notes may not be enough information for the performer.
In the second extreme, I refer to details such as slurs, articulations, and pedal markings, but more importantly the delineation of voices on a piano score. We usually denote different voices by stem direction. In the most general sense, we can usually show four voices on a grand staff without being too cluttered.
Q: The question I would like to ask here is: How much voicing is too much voicing? Here, I use "voicing" to refer to the delineation of music into voices.
Unfortunately, music notation can only communicate so much with the performer. There are constraints such as horizontal and vertical spacing on multiple levels, page turning, and economy of production, but in this post, I will focus on a smaller-scale scenario involving making decisions within a four-measure passage that fits on one line. To illustrate these issues, I will use the case of a composer arranging a piece of popular music for solo piano. I will be using a four-bar passage from the song Scarlet from the anime Ayashi no Ceres. (For those of you know the anime and/or song, this will be an extra treat.) Here is a MIDI excerpt that goes along with the article. If you want, you can probably find the full song on YouTube. Just search "Ayashi No Ceres Scarlet".
The first step I take in creating solo-piano arrangements of non-solo-piano music is to listen to the recording and to choose the best notes to include in the piano arrangement. Things that I need to keep in mind are:
Maximum stretch of the hands
Distribution of notes between hands
Important notes that determine the harmonic progression
So here is what I came up with:
Example 1
The music doesn't show a lot of detail yet, but it serves as a basis as to how I can split up the notes into voices or parts. The directive "con pedale" allows the performer to use the pedal to his liking, but doesn't give details such as where to pedal and where to not pedal in order to evoke the correct harmonies and prevent any unwanted dissonances.
Here is my first attempt:
Example 2
In this version, the melodic line has been singled out and further indicated by slurs to guide the performer with voicing (as the singer would sing it). In the third measure, notice how the upper staff has only one melodic line, yet the first chord is implied as belonging to an accompanying part.
Q: In such cases, would you separate the voices, and use rests to show the silences, or keep it the way it is for sake of clarity?
In the next attempt, the accompaniment is split up into multiple voices.
Example 3
A few changes have been made. The accompaniment is now delineated to show the bass line and the middle harmonizing part, which is shared between the two hands. At some points, the middle voice shares a similar rhythm with the bottom voice.
Q: In such cases, would you use two voices throughout to show the delineation of voices, or use a second voice only where the rhythm is very different?
Q: Is it necessary to mark phrasing for accompaniment voices?
In the end, this is what I came up with:
Example 4
The only major change here is the addition of a bass line that emphasizes the harmonic progression. You will notice that the notes don't always extend to the next chord change: sometimes it's a half note; sometimes it's a whole note. The reason for this related to the pedaling and the abstract concept of where a note ends.
In the first bar, the left hand can only sustain the low G until the A, and then it has to change positions to play the rest of the measure. The harmony implied here is a G-minor chord with an added second. I lifted the pedal at the B-flat because the A would create too much dissonance if it is sustained till the end of the measure.
In the second bar, I thought it would make sense to use a whole note, since the pedal is pretty much held for the entire bar, since all of the notes in the measure belong to the D-minor chord. So in an abstract sense, the F does sustain till the end of the measure, except the performer doesn't physically hold it down with his pinkie.
In the fourth bar, the notes played by the left hand span no more than an octave, so the performer can hold down the D with his pinkie and keep a clear harmony and use the pedal to produce a legato effect in the right hand.
Q: So my question here is: Where do you stand in terms of expressing the abstract idea of an implied harmony versus expressing what the performer can physically do at the piano?
Q: Also, which of the above solutions would you favour and why?
In addition to these questions, I would like to hear what people have to say about music notation in general.
The Trials is an incidental music piece from the video game Final Fantasy X (for PlayStation 2). It is played during the Cloister of Trials sections of the game. The piece is also known as "Palace of Ordeals."
Since I could not find this piece in the Piano Collections anthology, I thought I'd make a score of it for fun. I'm sure a lot of people out there also want to play this piece. Though it isn't nearly as complex as the Lilium score, it evokes an engaging contemplative mood.
