gaffae - My Last Name

"To be someone in the world, you must give up certain levels of freedom. Freedom is inseparable from its limits.

You are a mutant bird. For some, you may be blessed with the ability to soar through the skies with ease, but for others, your mere existence horrifies Mother Nature. To avoid trouble, you have been exiled and destined to live in an ancient, abandoned castle.

Your life until now has been simple: you prowl the castle, meet your basic needs with whatever you find in the forest, and stay away from all human contact. Suffering from a deep boredom, you realize that decades have passed since you withdrew from society. You no longer know the world; all the information you know comes from books that used to be in the castle library. Your presence means nothing to you either; you no longer know who you are. For the first time, you decide to visit the surrounding villages, hoping that people have forgotten your existence and that you are nothing more than a peculiar stranger. As you visit towns, you encounter their diverse problems, and if you want to help, you'll have to use your talents in the most creative ways. At first, people will be reluctant to accept you, but with some effort, you'll eventually be able to help them and, little by little, rewrite the memories in the collective imagination. Plus, for the first time you'll be able to shape your identity, only in contrast to others."

It's an adventure game. You fly around, solving puzzles in different villages, and occasionally use flight as an offensive against a malicious person.

This piece would be the final boss, because after exposing himself for a long time, naturally there are people who still remember who Farben is and there's even a kind of cult that seeks to hunt him down. You confront them, and the theme contains elements that evoke danger, but also your leitmotif, now richer after having gone out into the outside world. The main theme is a melody that ascends with a slight descent at the end (minute 1:07). I didn't think too hard about trying to represent the flight of a bird. The way I adhere to the theme is that the theme varies its harmony, limiting the levels of freedom in parallel with what happens in the story, as you meet more people.

The melody doesn't change. It begins with a chord that evokes power; as the melody repeats and the chords underneath change, some may evoke some uncertainty, perhaps even fear, but eventually some comfort, even changing the melody. A little, representing the change that comes with exchanging with others.

There are other elements too, like melodies that ascend and descend with wind instruments, sometimes very fast, sometimes very slow. The strings also make a back-and-forth motion every three bars for most of the piece, like the flapping of a bird's wings.

Regarding the software I used, it was solely Musescore 4. I thought about the theme for a while, but then I remembered a quote from Kierkegaard about freedom. I'm no expert on the subject or anything like that, but it made sense to me, so I decided to use that as a reference. I tried my best to represent the limits of freedom by varying the harmony of the theme, because although you can sense it from the melody, it's not something you can always take for granted. I would have liked to have made more variations to explore this idea more, but I started a day late.

I like orchestral music, especially in some Capcom video games like Monster Hunter or Resident Evil. I also like the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack. My main references in music of this style are Joe Hisahishi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Akira Senju, Shiro Sagisu, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko shimomura and Yoshihisa Hirano. I'm a novice tho.