Tanabata: Star Festival of the Seventh Night
by Kento Watanabe
Performed by Reigakusha (ryūteki, hichiriki, shō), Momenta Quartet (string quartet), Cris Ryan (narrator), and Kyle Ritenauer (conductor).
“Tanabata” is a musical representation with spoken narration of the folklore surrounding the Japanese star festival called “Tanabata”. Tanabata means “evening of the seventh”, and celebrates the annual intersection of the stars Vega and Altair. The folklore is a romantic telling of this astrological event, where Vega and Altair are personalized as the Princess Orihime and the Cow-herder Hikoboshi. The story is about star-crossed lovers who are only allowed to meet once a year in the heavens. Orihime is represented by the Japanese flute “Ryuteki”, and Hikobishi by the bright, oboe-like “Hichiriki”. Orihime's father, who is the ruler of the heavens is represented by the Japanese mouth-organ “Sho”. Each of these instruments represent each of these characters behind a background of the string quartet, representing the space of the heavens. Narration of the folktale itself accompanies the whole piece, guiding the listener through the whole folktale.
Based around Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's "Saria's Song", this 3-minute piano solo based on turning Saria's Song melody into a ragtime solo garnered over 50,000 hits on Youtube without any advertising, being featured on nobuooo.com , radiohyrule.com ,
In an ironic turn of events, Saria's Ragtime Jazz, a rearrangement of a videogame piece, has been written into the SNES videogame Mario Paint's "Mario Paint Composer" by a Youtuber who came across the song, resulting in a videogame rearrangement of a piano rearrangement of a videogame piece.
Traveler's Song is a string quartet that "reads" a poem in Chinese! Listen from the beginning and see if you can follow the strings "reading the poem":
What is the relationship between music and language? Traveler's Song attempts to answer this question by musically representing the spoken sounds of the Chinese language. The sounds of the poem being read, such as vowels, consonants, and pitch contour, are reflected in the melodies played by the strings, to show the relationship between speech and music. As a tonal language, the meaning of Chinese syllables is determined by the shape of the pitch, which is imitated by the string instrument "speaking" lines from the poem through its instrument. The resulting music reveals by intuitive, experiential means, the anthropological relations between music and language.
In English:
Traveler's Song
by Meng Jiao
The thread in the hands of a fond-hearted mother
Makes clothes for the body of her wayward boy;
Carefully she sews and thoroughly she mends,
Dreading the delays that will keep him late from home.
But how much love has the inch-long grass
For three spring months of the light of the sun?
