New track: "Let The Stars Fall Down"

Hello all! I’ve got a new track I’d like to share.

This is a tribute to one of my favorite modern media composers, Yuki Kajiura, and a re-arrangement of her piece, “Let The Stars Fall Down,” which originally was composed for the Fate/Zero TV series. I’ve actually wanted to do a rescore to one of her pieces for a long time, and I happened to come across a piano cover version of this track and used it as a basis to re-orchestrate it into a full, epic orchestral piece.

The form to this track is ABACA, but since both the A and B sections repeat in a different key, it could be thought of as AABBACA. It switches between the keys of E minor and G minor, but as E min is the relative minor of G major, you can also think of it as switching between the parallel Gmaj/Gmin. The main themes to the piece are left intact–I don’t develop them beyond the original, so my own touch that I added was in the harmonies, part writing and instrument choices. As Yuki Kajiura is mainly a pianist, I left the piano to play all the sections from start to end, mainly as accompaniment and orchestrated everting else around it. Tempo is vivace 165bpm which stays steady, but fells a bit slower in the B and C sections by using longer note durations.

Classic instrumentation:
2 flutes
piccolo
oboe
English horn
2 Bb clarinets
2 bassoons
4 horns in F
2 Bb trumpets
2 tenor trombones
bass trombone
tuba
percussion (drum kit)
strings

I used Dorico Pro with NotePerformer to score and added some percussion from AI Nucleus to help.
Mastered using iZotope Ozone 9 and then boosted with SoundCloud’s Dolby mastering at 25%.

Thanks!
Matt

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Lot’s of drive to this work. I’m not at all familiar with Yuki Kajiura but found myself drawn to her direct forward leaning approach to this piece. I liked what you did with it quite a bit. You’ve maintained its propulsivness but I also savored the delicate ballad sections as well. :grinning:
Cheers,
Charlie

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Thanks for listening Charles! To get it to go from the epic bits to the ballad-y bits with full orchestra was a bit challenging, at least the B section, since so much drops out, but I think it worked OK. I like to promote more Japanese composers as much as I can, many of them are excellent composers, but of course tend to do more video game and anime work, so their names tend to go unknown–though Yuki Kajiura is more a superstar composer is Japanese terms.

Here’s a link with one of her soundtracks to the same show I pulled this piece from. She’s really great!

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