“He was tapping the lingering dirt off the soles of his sneakers when the hair on his arms suddenly stood on end. A wave of something endlessly soft wove over him. Pink and purple cotton candy. Moth’s wings on his cheek.”
hello again and welcome to the third member of the issho ( by @toastytoaster22 ) music-inspired series!
for this particular motif, i wanted to try something a little different. we’ve been studying scene painting in music history, and i wanted to try my hand at depicting action through music! and so off i went to skim through issho once again, looking for a sentence, paragraph, or phrase to inspire me - and i did (hence the quote above)!
the theme is only 27 seconds long (i wrote this as if it were to be set over animation), but within that time, i believe i was able to conjure the key points of the sentence. for example-
1. the theme is in c major (a musical key historically viewed as completely pure, associated with innocence and the talk of children).
2. fluttering thirds in the melody mimic the flutter of a moth’s wings.
3. the melody spins around a major third, representing the spinning of a cotton candy machine.
4. free, sweet rubato (the musical term for free rhythmic variation and manipulation) weaving upwards in the left-hand harmony is to represent the something “endlessly soft” washing over teru.
5. within that left hand harmony, i also make use of a diminished c chord (i was trying to imply a sort of alien, out of this world, not quite natural feeling - powers are super cool but they can also be very dangerous)
6. the piece switches from c major to e major (a key used to imply full, laughing delight), fading out into a hanging dominant of b major to represent that this is far from the end: in fact, this is the very beginning of something beautiful.
apologies for the terrible sound quality this is me playing i could n o t figure out how to notate rythmic freedom in the program i usually use lol
