Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel OST - The flower will bloom (piano cover)

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One of the most poignant Fate OSTs that sometimes gets forgotten.

Earlier this year I decided that I wanted to arrange a lot of OSTs from shows that I liked, but after compiling the list I realized that most of them were from Fate.

It’s not hard to see why. When Yuki Kajiura is the composer and many of the arrangements contain strong orchestral elements, things are just destined to sound epic and moving.

The flower will bloom is no different in this sense, and the sense of heightened emotionality is exacerbated by the operatic vocalist who sings with sweeping gestures and a pulse that feels freer than the rest of the instruments yet still somehow feels more frantic.

I feel that people remember other themes like I’ll protect you from everything or The four rings because of the climactic moments they play at, but The flower will bloom plays towards the beginning of the first movie and serves as the transition from the Fate/stay night that we know into the Fate/stay night of Heaven’s Feel.

But what I love about that is that the confusion, the descent into madness, is palpable from the outset of the OST, and is not only a perfect representation of how our expectations for the series are going to unravel, but also foreshadows Sakura’s own downward spiral as well.

Writing the arrangement turned out to be tricky. Throughout the whole song the melody carried by the vocal is sung very freely, and so notating its rhythm was very difficult; much of it ended up as approximations. Added on top of that, the strings move in a very chromatic fashion, and, since I’m not very used to music like that, made very little sense to my ear, so ascertaining the pitches was somewhat difficult as well.

The rhythm of the percussion and guitars was something I wanted to replicate as well, which was made harmonically difficult by the fact that they riff on C for a very long time.

In the end, I decided that the bass would carry the syncopated rhythm of the percussion on C, the tenor would do its best to replicate the strings, and the soprano would replicate the main melody. And to tie it all together, I added an alto voice that moved stepwise to add to the chaos and confusion.

Now I will admit that I didn’t play this first section very well. If I had more time I would have worked on phrasing the melody and center voices better, but instead I had to devote a lot of effort to emphasizing the rhythm in the left hand and hitting the correct notes. But more on that later.

Where it gets interesting for me is the climax where it borrows from Aimer’s Hana no Uta, except the vocal is much more free and the chords again don’t move much. When pondering what to do about this, It struck me that downward movement created a sense of despair, and chromatic scales create a sense of chaos, so why not a descending chromatic scale? But that in and of itself wouldn’t carry enough power, so I made it an octave chromatic scale and just aimed to play as fast as possible as accurately as possible. Again, accuracy wasn’t super high, but that’s ok.

And that’s why there’s a lot of chromatic elements even in the climax. I quite like it, if I do say so myself.

At the end of the day, I feel as though I both underestimated the difficulty of this arrangement and just wanted to record so I was fine with not having it perfect. In my personal life I feel as though some things happened that I had no control over, which led to me feeling as though I was careening into the ground. The flower will bloom in its own way encapsulated that feeling of utter confusion and turmoil, and so I wanted to be able to share that with all of you.

I hope you enjoyed my arrangement! I don’t think I found another one of this song on YouTube, so if you like this one I guess you’re stuck listening to mine for now :)

Until next time,
- Watt

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