I’m going crazy over the melodic composition of this one. When I first heard this last week (I’m a big Pokemon fan but somehow never played Sinnoh generation games for some reason) and it sounded very nostalgic but at the same time very goofy, first impression was that it was cute but annoying and weird. The first 15 seconds are textbook Pokemon game hometown music, but then it gets real weird with the longer than expected motif going a 4th higher and chromatically going higher and higher.
Then the B section starts at 0:24 and the jazzier chords take over, combined with the extremely mellow instrumentation (again, fine choice of synths regarding the sound system limitations and the tiny speakers of the DS) but the music gets more complicated instead of getting simpler in the B section, and rather than achieving contrast per harmonic ways it stays in the same C major key but literally changes the genre of the song for a short while.
The subtlety of the Dominant 7th at 0:35 caught me so off guard in my first few listens; I always thought “There’s something spicy going on there” which later turned out to be the sneaky B flat I was hearing in the Alto range, while the Bass moving to the fifth (G) wasn’t really helping me understand what that all was supposed to mean. At which point the melody just casually moves to the Tenor clef which is the brain destroyer moment for this part of the music.
At 0:45 the music tries to get out of the B part, which is helped by the arpeggios in the higher range. The way they are composed in period accurate classical way, where the rhythm springs from 4 x 16th groups to 3 x 16th triplets and back to 16ths again to “fit” these arpeggios in the time where they’re supposed to be played. It’s not scaled using a computer like a computer composition would sound like, rather written in how a such classical music piece from 17th century would’ve been written on paper.
At 0:59 the extremely annoying synth comes again, ripping these beautifully shy elements of the B section and putting us back on track for the Recapitulation of the A section. This instrument again really did take me some time to get used to, after which I could truly appreciate this small composition. The composer probably was aware of the obnoxiousness of this instrument, but surely they made an educated decision to leave it that way instead of ‘fixing’ it. They probably even planned for it to make it annoying, in order to let the extremely mellow B theme be perceived in an even more convincing manner.
All in all, I’m very happy to have had the rare opportunity/chance of being exposed to such original Pokemon music first at 24 y.o., which provided a very critical lift of the nostalgia goggles. Very often such music has its fans looking at it from an immeasurable angle, blocking objective judgement of people. I’m happy to report, this music really is composed with extreme amount of care and/or talent making them objectively interesting and probably genius.
Piyano Bloğu | Emre Nurbeyler 