[MUSIC] Login theme for Leona!

--Edit: PotD WHAT OMG THANK YOU--

So, I wrote some music for Leona (designed as a contrast to Diana's login theme, which is fantastic). Enjoy!

(make sure to enable embedly if you're running a script permissions plugin)

"Sunrise Guardian" (Soundcloud)

#COMMENTARY

The initial thesis for “Sunrise Guardian” was to make a login theme appropriate for Leona, using “Daylight's End” (Diana's theme) as a stylistic foil (The duality of Leona and Diana is well established in lore, and thus presents a clear path for musical interpretation). Before writing a note of music, I first analyzed the orchestration and overall character of Diana's theme, noting in particular points which could readily be contrasted or kept constant while working on Leona's theme:

Here's Diana's theme for convenience:

https://soundcloud.com/leagueoflegends/daylights-end-dianas-theme

In Diana's theme:

• Vocals: solitary female voice, with lyrics in regular English. Heretical, somber in nature, with the sun as the focal point of hatred. Very much the center of the work.

• Harmony: Pedal bass tone (D minor); the bulk of the work lingers in D minor, and the harmonic rhythm remain slow throughout. Helps contribute to the sense of darkness.

• Rhythm: Long tones characterize the entire accompaniment. Clear sense of rubato throughout (with the exception of the third verse). Melodic lines often persist on a given syllable with plenty of step-wise motion.

• Texture: DARK. Religious, Solitary, Closed, beauty through courage. (Words I jotted down while listening).

• Orchestration: Primarily strings; some low brass, harp, and upper winds used to support the melody in the second verse, and chord changes in the third verse.

  Armed with this all-too-brief general analysis of the theme, I drew up the design template for Leona's theme:

Vocals: Full choir, with both male and female voices, and lyrics in Greek. Majestic, praising in nature, with the sun as the focal point of celebration. Much as the Catholic Mass was conducted in Latin for much of history, regardless of the native language of those attending, so too would the faith of the Solari be expressed in a more “elite”, less tangible, but nonetheless authoritative tongue; to contrast with the modern, matter-of-fact, and heretical vocal treatment in Daylight's End.

Harmony: Use the pedal tone only for the beginning, then transition to something of more classical song form with a “sunrise” moment. Use a major-sounding mode (The technical name of the mode I ended up using escapes me at the moment, but its G major with a lowered 6th and 7th; bottom line in film and video game music is “if it works, use it!”). Change chords with greater frequency. Modeling the transition from darkness to light with a change in harmonic rhythm and accompaniment helps contextualize the theme with Diana's, while also giving the best representation of the majesty of the sun: a sunrise! Yes, this might be slightly corny, but lets face it: the sun is core to Leona's lore.

Rhythm: Use a string ostinato to accompany the main thematic statement after ”sunrise moment”. Introduce it sooner, in sporadic fashion, to help build to the sunrise). Maintain a clear sense of tempo, particularly after the sunrise. Keep most of the lyrical treatment to one note = one syllable.

Texture: LIGHT, Religious, Community, Open, Beauty through devotion. (Retain the religious sense and thus the use of vocals and church-like modality, from Daylight's End).

Orchestration: Use both sustained and staccato strings, use a lot more brass (particularly horns), and bring in woodwinds (particularly double reeds) where appropriate to either support the vocals or power a counter-melody.

One day while out doing a morning walk, a great melodic idea popped in my head; which I promptly recorded into my handheld recording device, then transcribed and expanded when I got home. (Absolute pitch comes in handy; you don't have to keep a written sketchpad around for when those ideas pop out of nowhere, you can just hum them, then transcribe in Finale/Sibelius when you get home). The results at that stage, reproduced for reference:

http://i.imgur.com/eEHSJy6

As many composers will tell you, often the hardest part of writing a piece is the first couple of measures. Particularly in media music, you can often take a few motifs and ideas (15 seconds or so of material, for instance) and use a bunch of compositional techniques to make them last several minutes of music. The first few measures of the melody and the string accompaniment pattern established here inform the sound of the entire two minute theme.

Lyrics were trickier. Music is my second language, and Java my third, so no luck with non-English languages. I consulted with a dear friend to make some poetry that was A. Greek, B. Sun related, and C. would sound good rendered by a choir. We got B and C right, and Google translate was a godsend for A (We took a verse of French, translated to Greek, and then to phoenetics). Those of you who are fluent in Greek, I apologize in advance:

Brilliant brille la lumière de l'univers sur la terre. Un bouquet de l'ampleur des mondes. Pas de mots,Aucun mot ne peut capturer La lumière de l'univers qui brille sur la terre.

Λαμπρό λάμπει το φως του σύμπαντος στη γη. Μια δέσμη του μεγέθους των κόσμων. Δεν υπάρχουν λόγια, δεν υπάρχουν λέξεις μπορεί να συλλάβει, Το φως του κόσμου λάμπει πάνω στη γη.

Lampró lámpei to fo̱s tou sýmpantos sti̱ gi̱. Mia désmi̱ tou megéthous to̱n kósmo̱n. Den ypárchoun lógia, den ypárchoun léxeis boreí na syllávei to fo̱s tou kósmou lámpei páno̱ sti̱ gi̱.

In multimedia music, when lyrical meaning isn't important to the picture/game, SOUND takes priority. It needn't make literal sense if the sensation is what matters. Often composers will use broken english, small phrases of foreign languages, and jibberish to fill out vocal segments to make them sound epic (Fun fact: next time you watch “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm”, listen to the opening credits in reverse if you can; Shirley Walker took the names of all the personnel on her music team, reversed them, and used the results as the lyrical material for EVERY CHORAL MOMENT IN THE MOVIE. The opening credits feature all of the names). Being sun-related, majestic in nature, and greek-sounding was all I really needed from the words (of which I only used the first two lines). Besides, most folks in the Solari probably don't even know what the words mean when singing this anyway, as its an ancient tradition!

We've already covered a lot of ground here, so I'll summarize the last remaining steps for now and indulge in more specifics on a future piece:

• Take the completed sketch material from Finale (my notation software and functionally sketchpad), and dump the midi file of it into Cubase (my sequencer).

• Orchestrate (assign the parts to their final instruments)

• Program the choir to sing the lyrics (yes, the virtual choir is actually singing the lyrics. Eastwest Symphonic Choirs' WordBuilder OP)

• Add some percussion.

• Tweak, massage, and otherwise program the performance data of all the instruments in all of their sections.

• Mix, master, bounce!

• Repeat the last few steps as needed for future versions of the piece.

I hope you guys enjoyed this look into my composition process and some of the design thoughts that went into this piece. I would love to hear your feedback, both on my presentation and on the music itself. I'll be doing a nice big project (Summoners Rift music) for a while, but I'll probably want to take a break every once in a while to give another older champion a theme song, so let me know who you'd like to hear done!