Beyond the Sands/Den of Darkness

Track 5-4: Beyond the Sands (Day/Night)

I called “A Verdant Wind Blows” my favorite town theme in an earlier post, but I’m going to have to take that back already, haha! Please let this theme share first place. m_ _m

This is a low-tempo, mellow track, and I’m particularly fond of the melody. The Asian-style sound has hints of both Japanese and Chineseness, and I think the softly falling phrases in the refrain also came out well.

Another distinctive feature of this piece is the instrumentation. The day version features a yangqin, and the night version an ondes Martenot.

The yangqin is a Chinese hammered dulcimer, with strings stretched over in a body shaped like a miniature qin and struck with bamboo mallets to make a sound. As a hammered stringed instrument, its sound necessarily has decay. To play longer notes, you need to use tremolo, a technique in which the string is struck in rapid succession with the right and left mallet to extend the sound. The timbre depends on the type of mallet you use, and even changing the material on the face of the mallet can produce various different sounds. The yangqin appears at about 0:26 in the day version, and I invite you to savor the beauty of the tremolo technique described above.

The night version features the ondes Martenot, which is even rarer than the yangqin. The interview below contains a detailed description of the ondes Martenot, so please check it out if you’d like to know more.

Both instruments appear nowhere else on the soundtrack, so we had to call in and record performers for this piece alone. This shows how invested I was in getting the sound right.

Track 5-6: Den of Darkness

When I composed this theme, I was imagining a chamber music–style dance piece playing in a mansion-style dungeon. The solo parts for violin and cello end up intertwining to create a virtuosic ensemble sound.

The title “Den of Darkness” gives the impression of a hideaway for wretched reprobate, but I actually wanted to convey the darkness people nurture within their hearts—pride, vanity, and so on—rather than malice as such, and suggest a location where these await the player.

Translation: Matt Treyvaud