Musings in Anime Music [12]: “Avec Ma Seour”

This is probably my favorite BGM track evar – yes, EVAR. The epicness of this solo piano piece rivals – or outdoes – even Uematsu’s epic FFX intro theme, “To Zanarkand.”

One of the things I like most about this BGM piece is the transition back into the theme – the recapitulation and its perhaps clever use of the oh-so-forbidden parallel fifth.

Bar 35 features a Cbmaj7(add 11) chord (root and fifth in the left hand) while the perfect interval moves up – the ostinato pattern remaining static – to implicate the Bbmin7(add 11). Thus the progression is, in Gb major, IV-vi-IV-I. Bar 37 just repeats 35, so essentially it’s ||: IV-vi :||. Anyway I just thought that was an interesting part. Here’s the rest of the sheet music.

2 Comments

  1. Posted July 5, 2008 at 3:58 am | Permalink

    Music major? :] Or do you just have a hobby of playing piano?
    Beautiful transitions, certainly. And rivals, maybe. But for me, it can’t outdo “To Zanarkand”. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m more familiar with the FFX stuffs than I am with this series, or maybe because there’s this flow to “To Zanarkand” that makes me fall in love with it everytime I play or hear it.

    But it is really pretty. I like it, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of the AIR’s Natsukage for some reason…

  2. Posted July 6, 2008 at 1:45 pm | Permalink

    Used-to-be soon-to-be music major, but I switched a year or so ago. I can’t play piano anymore in any case. To Z[...] is a great piece and I think that it’s much more tonally defined – it doesn’t incorporate a lot of ambiguous major 7th and major 9th chords to give you that airy feeling like in this piece, and so it gives off a much more “concrete” sonority, albeit a very sad one. To Zanarkand’s progression is a lot more kinetic, utilizing a larger portion of its area in the circle of fifths, while I think Avec Ma Seour reolves around a I-vi-IV-V variation, but nevertheless in an ambivalent, buoyant feeling. Uematsu’s theme is, too, much more blunt and blatant, a lot more rigidly defined, and so that much more noticable – it is a theme – whereas this piece is background, meant to be background, and does a damn good job at it.

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