I’ve been more active on Instagram lately, and had the pleasure of being a guest on my friend Sydney‘s live stream earlier this evening, where talked about two Legend of Zelda pieces: “Great Fairy Fountain”, from Ocarina of Time, and “Song of Healing”, from Majora’s Mask. Here’s a brief recap of what we covered in our hour-long stream!

Great Fairy Fountain

Pattern Recognition:

• Straight quarter notes in the main melody
• Melodic contour
• Chords – in the three sixteenth notes following each beat within each measure, the notes are the same!

Inversions:

• same chord, different voicings
  • for example: C-E-G is in root position, then first inversion has E on the bottom, and second inversion has G on the bottom!

The opening of this piece is a Db dominant 7 + 9 chord, with different inversions, going up and up and up!

Register:

• piano is a really good instrument to show register
  • bass/lower register: power! epic, scary
  • treble/higher register: delicate, fairy-like, sparkly
• piano can contribute so many different feelings and moods because of its incredible range! 88 keys / 7.5 octaves

Song of Healing

Form/Sections:

• A section:
  • Lydian mode (maybe!?)
    • 
  • Syncopation
    • melody + accompaniment line up on the downbeat, but accompaniment starts playing on the upbeat
  • Melodically-based
    • the memorable melody occurs in the beginning of this song
• B section:
  • Major
    • 
  •  Even Rhythms
  •  Harmonically-based
    • more recognizable chords in the second section, not as memorable of a tune as the beginning

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We talked about a few other things, answering questions and talking more generally about the musical genius that is Koji Kondo 🙂

Be sure to follow Sydney on Smart Game Piano, and her Instagram of the same name, and please follow me on Instagram as well! ^_^ We may do more of these lives streams together in the future, so stay tuned!