Exploring "When Shadows Take Over"

A J Greengrove

Published:

When Shadows Take Over: the final “let’s explore dark, minor modal mixture” of this album.

(Note to reader: these are my earlier blogposts heavy in music theory and meandering in thought. I’ll slowly revisit and backlink posts to clarify things.)

I already listed the other pieces exploring similar concepts, this one included, in the post Exploring “Strong Currents in the Unknown Waters”. Now I will list some peculiarities for this piece.

To peek into this ‘audio dungeon exploration’ before shopping it in the Bandcamp market (for name your gold coins):

The 0:33 mark flirts with a minor7th harmony, which will permeate the rest of this improvisation. By opening the seventh sonorities, I like to think of an analogy of applying more saturation to the harmonic palette.

Referring to the many pieces of this album “exploring dark, minor modal mixture”: interestingly, the minor seventh sweetens the bvi:m7 in the 00:38 mark somewhat. The subsequent passages remind me of Nobuo Uematsu’s middle period style, something like Final Fantasy VI or VII soundtracks, to be honest.

(LilyPond code)
#(ly:set-option 'resolution 200)
\version "2.24.4"
\language "english"
\pointAndClickOff
\header { tagline = "" }
melody = \relative a { <a c e>1 <af c f> }
\score {
  <<
    \time 4/4
    \new Staff { \clef "treble" \melody }
    \new TabStaff \with {} <<
      \new TabVoice { \melody }
    >>
  >>
}

The piece's motif in musical notation.

Figure 1: “When Shadows Take Over” Motif

FinallyFantasylly, I didn’t anticipate the 13 & +9 chords in the 1:02 mark? In the 1:33 mark an arpeggiated dominant introduces an allusion to augmented harmony, which is unheard of elsewhere in this piece; however, since we’re in the middle of repeating the opening material, this does provide some variance.

The 1:50 mark introduces a half-diminished harmony: however, in my thinking, it actually acts as a “dominant for the natural phrygian closure”, or in other words the final harmony in the 1:54 mark.

Here’s the recording session video of the piece: