Carmina Burana

Final Fantasy Friday: There’s Always That One Song

/ The Shameful Narcissist / 23 Comments
A Final Fantasy (et al) post to welcome you to the glory of Friday (if you don’t have weekends off then may this hopefully brighten the midst of your work week) with more located here!

It’s later on Friday than I’d like it to be, but 11:00 still counts as FFF.  I had to take a dose of one of my prescriptions that causes drowsiness.  It’s a twice a day medicine, and I was initially taking it morning and evening, but I had the annoying side effect of passing out after work every day, so I switched it to after work and before bed.  I’ve been kind of under the weather lately though, so I think my after work dose today did me in (I also started taking something new for my asthma.  I swear it’s like symptom roulette).  Napping is great.  It’s also thankfully Friday, and this is a really easy Final Fantasy question for me.

Many of you already expressed this during the Favorite Soundtrack question, and I may have used this in one of my Questions of the Week, but…

What’s your all time favorite Final Fantasy song?  If it’s too painful to pick just one, I understand.

“One Winged Angel” from Final Fantasy VII, which I recently found out is always played either as an encore or part of the regular program at the Distant Worlds concerts, is unquestionably my favorite.  I love both the original with its lyrics lovingly borrowed from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana…

or the Advent Children version with its original Latin verse.

I adore that Nobuo Uematsu used Orff as an influence (the Carmina Burana lyrics fit so well), but I also love the dueling electric guitars in the Advent version.  Dueling guitars during a duel makes the music meta nor can I decide if my favorite line is “Veni fili veni mi fili hic veni da mihi mortem iterum” from Advent or the traditional “Veni veni venias, ne me mori facias.”  Even though I’m planning on having the latter “Ne me mori facias” tattooed on my arm, I do so love saying the first, and both lines are pretty heartbreaking.

It’s also the theme song for my favorite character so there’s that.

What’s your favorite song?  Leave a link in the comments if you want and let’s discuss more awesome music!

Final Fantasy Friday: Final Fantasy Tarot – X The Wheel of Fortune

/ The Shameful Narcissist / 7 Comments

<–IX The Hermit                                                                                          XI Justice–>

This is my current Final Fantasy Friday post where I’ll be discussing which characters I think exemplify each card of the Major Arcana.  If this is your first time here, please head over to my Final Fantasy Tarot page for explanation.  Now onto the next card!

X The Wheel of Fortune

the-wheel-of-fortune-setzer

Picture of Setzer is located here at The Cosplay House

No this is not due to my silver hair/black clothes fetish.  I actually was never into Setzer from VI until very recently when I started reading a fellow fanfiction writer’s story I’m the Darkness, You’re the Starlight that pairs him and my favorite, Celes (whom I haven’t used yet…), but this post is not about that.

Who else could I pick for the Wheel of Fortune but a gambler who takes the highest stakes of all?  The Wheel is a card of luck and changing fortunes, and not only does the gambler encompass that, but so does the very world in which he dwells.  It goes from balance to ruin at the shift of a statue, but even in the darkness all is not lost.

The card itself is the only one in the Rider Waite deck to have the words “tarot” etched on it in a round, and it only says so if you literally come back again to that first “t.”  It could also spell “rota,” which means “wheel,” so the card is double meta.  It names the deck and it names itself, and the Wheel of Fortune (besides being a well known game show) is the focus in a song nearly everyone has heard, the line in question being “rota tu volubilis” (You whirling wheel.)

For some reason only my two year ago self knows, I was going to pick the Sphere Grid from FFX for this card probably because it resembles a convoluted wheel?  I don’t know how the two year’s younger Narcissist’s mind works, but in the parted haze my current mental machinations, I realized there would be no better choice than a man who’s very occupation is luck.  Ante up.

Mr. Panda guessed it correctly this week!  While I’m not certain of the tally, I have a feeling that he may be in the lead.  Next week is the half point, and I’ll give a detailed breakdown then.

Next week is XI Justice, which seems simple in concept, but is far more complicated in application.

Happy guessing!

<–IX The Hermit                                                                                          XI Justice–>

Save

Question of the Week: 6/26/16

/ The Shameful Narcissist / 6 Comments

<–Question of the Week: 6/19/16          Question of the Week: 7/3/16–>

The Question of the Week is posted every Sunday and will consist of a question followed by my answer and explanation to the same.  Some questions will only require a simple answer that could potentially be followed by an explanation.  Many questions will be writer oriented, but not all.  Everyone is encouraged to answer in the comments and discussions/follow up questions are more than welcome!

What is your favorite language to sing in?

Latin is my favorite language to sing in, but German is a close second.  This means I have a great appreciation for E Nomine, a German musical project that features both Ominous Latin Chanting and their mother tongue.

(Um okay, oh…my…God.  So I was looking up the link for Ominous Latin Chanting above and came across this gem from DIssidia. Squeenix/Final Fantasy loves its OLC)

This…is my favorite song by them.  I’m planning an AMV for it using FFVII and Sephiroth (of course).  I first heard this years and years ago when flash videos were a thing, and there was one entitled Faust. The video itself surprisingly holds up, though I think the song really helps.  I’m honestly surprised I found it on YouTube.  I’ve been trying to locate it for a while and just happened to luck out today.  I think there’s some thing with videos being available between Germany and the US.  I’ve had some friends over there tell me that they can’t see videos with copyrighted music, mores the pity :\

I’ve sung many songs in Latin back when I was a choir girl among them of course selections from Carmina Burana (“O Fortuna” is so overplayed now that I’m not even going to bother with that one.  I actually like the below a bit better probably for the fore mentioned reason).

I can still easily memorize the words even though I didn’t really study nor do I actually speak Latin, but I taught myself the words to the original “One Winged Angel” (which for the unknowing takes its lyrics from selections in Carmina Burana…god I miss singing that).

the Advent Children version

in addition to “The Promised Land,” which is from the fore mentioned movie as well.

 

I will look up the translation and sing along with the song as it plays, and this somehow carves the words into my mind if I do it enough times.  I think AC OWA took me ten minutes to memorize, but “The Promised Land” was a bit longer.  I’m still trying to commit the Advent hymn “Veni Veni Emmanuel” to memory.

Then there’s Vivaldi’s “Et In Terra Pax” from his Gloria.  This song is absolutely aetherial, and quite difficult to sing.

I feel as though I more answered the question, “What are your favorite songs in your non-native tongue?” instead of my stated question.  Maybe I just answered both.  But I feel as though I’ve neglected my very close second German even though I did initially laud a German based band.  Hm, well, I must say that another song I did in my choir days was by Beethoven, but for the life of me I can’t find it.  For some reason I thought it was called Beethoven’s Chorale Fantasy, but all the versions I locate don’t have words.  I can remember some of the ones we sang, but I don’t think I could spell them well enough to google.

What is your favorite language(s) to sing in that isn’t your native tongue?  It could be one from a second language.  What are your favorite songs in said language(s)?

I look forward to your answers in the comments!

<–Question of the Week: 6/19/16          Question of the Week: 7/3/16–>

The Major and the Minor Switch

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This is one of the many articles/review that I have reblogged from Caffeine Crew, the collaborative geek blog I write for.  I am in the process of editing/updating them to truly post here on my personal blog.

The minor key plays grim hostess to most of my favorite songs. Like many I find it to be the register of rue and darkness, and that just speaks to my eclectic tastes. I decided to catalog just what percentage of my regular playlist was minor one day, and the results were pretty substantial.

One day I was puttering around TV Tropes where I spend a good portion of my time, and I ended up in the video games section of the Awesome Music page, and there was a link to a G major version of “One Winged Angel.” I listened to it and just…no. No, no, no. It’s just wrong, and wrong in a different way than the wrongness the song is trying to project. This did get me thinking though about other instances where major songs are switched to minor, minor song are switched to major, and songs that use both throughout. I’m going to post both the original song and the switched version where applicable in my attempt to break down what I’ve found.

Note: I am not a music theory expert.  I actually failed that class, but I have played piano since the age of 5, have good enough relative pitch to figure out most melodies by ear, and am a pretty decent vocalist.

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