
Then, the world opens up once more, the sky fills with iridescence, and the legends and loneliness of the land present themselves one last time, engulfing us in a whirlwind that finally leaves us with a bittersweet taste in our mouths.
Track 13
A Lantern Rite Journey
Part 3: The Romance of Liyue
The defining characteristic of this piece to me is the guzheng and how active it is. Fortunately the bass is pretty sparse, so writing the guzheng part as the middle melody was pretty straightforward, and the jumps to play the grace notes definitely gave them a bit of the rolled, plucked feeling.
However, when I was writing this arrangement, I heard in my head a fuller, richer, more dramatic version of the melody, one that felt like it would really herald in the essence of the theatrical I was looking for in this last part of the album. So I wrote my own interpretation/variation on the melody.
I transitioned with a cadenza-like section to build, then played the melody as tremolos to replicate again the plucking of the guzheng. The first few times I worked on the section I instinctively gravitated towards the arpeggio pattern in Chopin's Ocean Etude (Op. 25 No. 12) so I kept that in the left hand.
But for the very end, I was reminded of the kind of deep sadness that characters like Zhongli and Madam Ping perhaps carry from having memories of friends long past, which is why my arrangement suddenly drops in energy and ends on an almost pensively melancholic note.
Sheets:
Artwork: @Silverpixia
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