Exposition

Arranging Video Games Music in a 19th-century Fashion (2025)

Filippo Zaccaria
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How can i take inspiration from 19th-century sources to arrange melodies from video games for clarinet and piano? This research was born to guide me in the composition of a series of historically inspired pieces; more precisely, in the arrangement of contemporary tunes from video games, treated in a similar way as opera arias were in the 1800s by composers such as Czerny, Liszt and Cavallini. As I ideally wanted my work to resemble real 19th-century compositions, I was faced with a series of questions that could be summed up in the following three: are all melodies suitable for this endeavor? How should I deal with the original harmonies? What genres can I use to arrange? To each of them I dedicated a chapter, starting from the first and most restrictive, the one about melody. I considered it as such because, as I would like my pieces to be heard and understood, I think that melodies should be left unchanged; however, as I also wanted them to follow 19th century “rules”, it follows that only certain melodies can be used. Therefore, I determined some boundaries to be respected in regard to mode, rhythm and meter. In the second chapter, about harmony, I followed a less systematic approach, as writing down all the limitations didn’t seem very realistic; so, I presented them more implicitly, by applying them directly to the music and explaining my choices. It was evident that, at least in the limited corpus of melodies I had chosen, many changes had to be made to the original harmonies in order to make them “right”. Finally, I examined the genres which I could use to arrange existing material, determining two main ones, the fantasy and the variations, and two “ancillary” ones, the fugue and the passacaglia. For three of them I gave a general explanation and showed my own way of applying them.
typeresearch exposition
keywords19th century, Arranging, Aesthetics and Culture Discourse, games
date08/10/2024
published14/07/2025
last modified14/07/2025
statuslimited publication
copyrightFilippo Zaccaria
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3063139/3181020
published inKC Research Portal
portal issue3. Internal publication


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comments: 1 (last entry by Bart van Oort - 05/03/2025 at 11:52)