New Arrangement: "Agatio and Karst's Battle Theme" from Golden Sun: The Lost Age (2002
A long time in the request queue, I've finally created an orchestral arrangement of "Agatio and Karst's Battle Theme" from the classic JRPG, "Golden Sun: The Lost Age" (2002).
Feel free to download the score and recording here!
If you are one of my Patrons, you can now find the MIDI, XML and SIB files I created for this arrangement now available to download from your Patreon Google Drive folder!
Arranger's Note:
"The work itself is nearly identical to its precursor track - "Agatio and Karst" - except with a faster tempo, the addition of a drum kit and slightly more dissonant harmonies.
Here, I've enhanced the inner chromatic writing to not only appear in the trombones, but in a chanting male choir spouting various Latin phrases.
To further add to its dissonant nature, I accentuated the off-beat cymbal clashes in the drum kit (e.g. b.1 and b.3) with additional support from the piano, lower brass and strings, and bass drum. This creates a greater disjointed feeling of syncopation as the downbeat is switched to an off-beat pulse (momentarily!)
By 0:23, the melody explodes into 3 octaves of strings, with the chromatic underbelly continuing rapidly with an aggressive rhythmic ostinato.
By 0:42, this dissonance continues with damped tam-tam strikes, trumpet responses to the string tritones, and eventually the addition of a harsh clustered choir and chromatic violins and winds, culminating with a final glissando downward from several instruments as the track repeats.
There was one very interesting moment at 0:36 where the bass instruments are not actually playing the tonic note (as they usually do). Instead, here they play a semitone above the tonic (F-sharp rather than F-natural), which was incredibly surprising to find in the original, but it nevertheless succeeds in creating a wonderful momentary dissonant crunch."
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