I had some fun the past couple of months writing a “remix” of the main theme from 2017′s Classical Bijoux. With music written by Oota Takeshi and Takahashi Megumi, it was the first revue I saw live and the work really stuck with me. I composed a bit of music in college, primarily works for video games, a student musical, and a local spa, so my focus was not on making a direct remix of the original like something a DJ would do, but instead take bits and pieces of orchestration, melody, etc. to make something new. I don’t imagine it will be everyone’s cup of tea, but I have a couple of observations that might be interesting nonetheless. (The end result is the last video after the jump.)
I started out by using digital audio tricks to get a better understanding of what the music was doing. Normally I would use my ear to try and determine what each instrument was doing. Unfortunately however the Revue does not release studio recordings of any of their shows and my ears struggled with the live sound.
(To release studio recordings would no doubt be an enormous cost, the musicians are probably overlapping rehearsals and performances as it was, and I would argue the audience vibe is an important part of the instrumentation you can’t capture otherwise.)
I instead popped a track from the CD into Ableton and ran the “Convert * to MIDI” command. The * in this case was for the harmony, but it can also do the melody and drums. The algorithm however is expecting just one of these at a time, not all three. Add in the slightly delayed audience clapping and the program can only produce a cacophony.
(Shoutout to the audience however - they clapped consistently at a ~132bpm, while the song is ~135bpm.)
Here is a ~very~ tiny snippet of the original. If you’d like to hear more, there is a 90 second preview on iTunes, or you can pick up the CD on the takarazuka-an website, Amazon, or iTunes. (If you can spring for it, I definitely recommend the DVD/Blu-Ray, especially as it is Asaka Manato’s taidan!)
And here is the hot mess that Ableton thought it was:
lol it tried. Notice however when you line it up with the audio:
It totally works!
I listened to just the algorithm reduction for the entire track and rewrote the melody / basic harmony into a piano line so I could see what notes we were actually dealing with. It’s in a minor for the majority, at about 135bpm, and the main theme comes back quite a bit. Which makes sense, given that the main theme of a revue aims to introduce all of the troupe’s performers, the overarching concept for the show, and usually hint at where it’s going. In the case of this show Asaka Manato outlines characteristics of gemstones, which are the inspiration for each scene.
Repeating the theme several times over however when you are not using vocals gets boring very quickly, so I trimmed quite a few reprisals and musical interludes/vamps.
The audience clapping delay in the computer generated reduction introduced a sort of swing rhythm to the song I didn’t hear otherwise, and in listening to the track isolated over and over, I realized that there are conga drums. (You can hear them on the far right if you have stereo, starting halfway through the first video.)
After many many iterations, in which it got slower and slower, and the instrumentation more and more simple, I ended up with this:
(Note: I am not a audio mixer in the least, so apologies if it sounds too compressed or spikes your speakers. Headphone are preferred)
I wanted to start with a pretty basic restatement of the theme, and as it goes along introduce more and more of my own ideas that sprung up from messing with various rhythms and melodies from elsewhere in the work.
Some other random notes:
Asaka Manato sounds like an alto saxophone or the lower register of a flute to me, depending on how forcefully she is singing.
Makaze Suzuho sounds like a bari sax to me, with a bit of clarinet to smooth it out.
The marimba acts as the non-star troupe members. They are constantly keeping it moving and fun without distracting too much (I hope) from the main voices (woodwinds in this case)
The bells, which often just mimic the marimba, save for a few transitions, act as the musumeyaku, the underutilized not-so-secret sauce to any good revue.
The solo flute solo with sporadic percussion is the musumeyaku solo in the original - it is so effective at resetting the momentum that I wanted to be sure to include the same effect in some way.
The egg shaker is a remnant of the audience clap - it drives the more sturdy rhythmic sections, and gets out of the way when the tempo or mood changes, just as the audience would pause when the song changes a bit, then jump back in when it stabilizes.
All in all I enjoyed writing this piece quite a bit, and I hope you enjoyed the read!
Please support a legit release of the original work, “Land of the Gods / Classical Bijoux” on iTunes, Amazon, or taka-an (https://www.takarazuka-an.co.jp/fs/takarazuka/TCAB-52B)
April Update: Just released ... Classical Chillwave Synthwave Retrowave! Flashback to the electronic sounds of the 80s. Great fun to produce! Available worldwide on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify and more.
Please add and share on your playlists and social media. Thank you so much for listening!
