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HELLO OKAY so lol it may not sound like it, but this is by far one of the most difficult arrangements I've come up with in recent memory 😭 I wrote it back in October while I was going through all the Igavanias and playing Aria, it took about two weeks to write, and pretty much been working on it since, so that's like...3.5 months lol. That was what I expected though, since structurally it was reminiscent of a baroque duo with basso continuo accompaniment, and I was like heck I'm hearing three voices?? Let's turn it into a Bach Sinfonia lol and well...those are hard. So. Here we are, finally hahaha.

I really do love the title so much though, because not only is it the theme that plays in the library/study of Dracula's Castle in Aria, but it's an adorable little pun on "study" as in musical study, like an etude, and as Bach wrote the Inventions and Sinfonias as exercises for his students, it was just TOO perfect of an opportunity to actually try to turn it into a three part invention. A lot of the voices and melodic lines required heavy tweaking, registral shifts, correcting the counterpoint (SORRY MS YAMANE I LOVE YOU), and to add developmental interest, inversion and retrograde inversion of the subject and countersubject, blah blah etc. Then started that idiomatic second section and was feeling cute so I was like oh heck let's just slip a REAL ARIA in there lol and in goes the Aria from the 6th Partita lmao, just really slowed down, leading back to the restatement of the subject. Since Yamane's final section in the original theme breaks up the counterpoint, I had to shift gears from Bach to Scarlatti, threw in a Neapolitan 6th, slightly virtuosic RH triplet figurations and a tiny reference to Castlevania 2 ahahahaha, hopefully some of you will hear it.

Of course all of this was super taxing to learn, as Bach intended his two and three part inventions to develop cantabile playing in two and three independent voices, and this was no exception, having three voices throughout and trying to keep them all distinct. Strange and unnatural fingerings abounded lol and it's still not exactly where I think it could be, but we gotta move on at some point haha. It was tough, but rewarding to really try to work this one out! It's like Wood Carving Partita's more adorable, concise, and dare I say more interesting little brother--there's a lot going on in a small package, tight melodic material, and three extremely cool and unexpected modulations. I absolutely loved working on this and I hope you enjoy it too!

Even though SOTN is number one in my heart forever, Aria of Sorrow was such a banger of a game, holy cow. The soul system was so well designed, it was so fun and addictive to collect souls and super satisfying when I accidentally got this huge axe from a Red Minotaur and swung that around both phases of the final boss and he went down in two seconds lol. Story was fantastic, music wasn't as memorable to me as SOTN, but there were still plenty of standout themes, like this one.

All my Castlevania covers: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp-SYUSsVXsaK8VycuQumOyXjpEKfHrDZ&si=PVM87UeinZK5VBgS

(SPEAKING OF WOOD CARVING PARTITA!!! A VERSION 2 IS IN THE WORKS 😀😀😀 and may or may not be working on a Yakuza piano collections nobody asked for lmao)