How Final Fantasy VII's Victory Theme Defies Expectations

[Music] so the last couple of videos I've done have been comparative analyses taking a few different pieces and seeing what they have in common for this video I wanted to take one relatively short piece and just analyze it as thoroughly as possible and the piece I chose is Final Fantasy 7's Victory Fanfare before we dive in it's important to know where the song's coming from up until 7 the Final Fantasy games all used a reorchestrated version of the original Victory theme featuring a pretty typical One Flat 6 flat 71 walkup this chord progression has been called the Mario Cadence because of its iconic use as the level complete theme in the original Super Mario [Applause] Bros and now has become synonymous with Victory Music In general the original Victory themes melody was pretty straightforward using exclusively the root of each chord for the opening Fanfare the bass keeps us from being too redundant by giving us a little more motion and landing on the fifth for the C flat and d flat cords I hate having to say C flat so much you have no idea I want to just say B but technically it is C flat and I feel like I have to maintain some level of professionalism and you know how pantic music the Nerds can be after the two bar Fanfare we get this Jolly Little tune this is actually a good example of antici consequent period which is a simple melodic structure that boils down to a kind of question and answer form the first bar gives us our main Motif a 5454 over the one cord this Contour is moved up to the 1717 of the subsequent flat 7 chord and then we get a slightly altered version of this phrase that jumps down to an F which is the two in the key of E flat and the third of the underlying d flat chord so here we have our first full melodic statement ending on a note found in the key's dominant chord this is what makes it sound like a question just like how in harmony a five chord wants to resolve to one in Melody the chord tones of a five chord usually want to resolve to a chord tone of the one chord denying that makes it so the music doesn't feel complete yet and it still wants to keep going this is called the antient the next phrase is an exact duplicate of the first except instead of running down to an F we jump up to an E flat the tonic [Music] the tonic being the most stable note in a scale is the perfect choice for when you want to phrase to sound finished it's nice and resolved and it doesn't feel like it has to keep going this is the consequent think of the first phrase as asking a question and the second phrase as giving the answer nobuo uatu doesn't perfectly stick to the structure though and we'll see why in a minute to keep cohesiveness with the intro uatu exclusively uses the one flat 7 and Flat 6 ch s in the second section we get a one flat 7 Vamp for most of it very common for Heroic and fantasy music but then on the last bar over our nice resolved E flat in the melody we get this flat six chord out of left field undercutting the melodic resolution here's what it would sound like with a more typical 51 [Applause] ending now back to the U Matsu version playing with our expectations as listeners is the mark of a really great composer I thought this video was about Final Fantasy 7 okay okay okay on the note of playing with our expectations let's take a look at the Final Fantasy 7 Victory Fanfare the opening Melody is completely preserved from the original theme and sets the expectation that we're in for a little more of the same the first bar is pretty much the same as the original with just a little bit of foreshadowing for what's to come with the alteration of the flat six chord instead of a straight A flat major we get an A flat sus which introduces us to the D flat note this note is reinforced in the base making it an A flat sus over d flat this is foreshadowing because instead of resolving nicely to the one the flat 7 deceptively resolves up to the flat 2 d flat major hearing the d flat note introduced a bar earlier keeps this deceptive resolution sounding cohesive to the rest of the music but it's it's still such a surprising move that it catches us totally off guard the melody resolving to the tonic or at least what we thought was the tonic adds to the shock of this resolution and it works because the one of the one chord becomes the major seven of the flat 2 chord this sort of deceptive resolution is pretty common in jazz settings what adds to it in this song is the fact that the melody entirely fits into the dlat major scale so even though it's a surprising move it doesn't sound like it's a mistake also look at the way the inner voices slide around in these first two bars especially this bottom voice after jumping down to foreshadow the d flat it moves up by a semmit tone before giving us this ascending line that seamlessly lands on the ninth of the flat 2 chord as part of this awesome voicing I love how this sounds especially the way the tripet Baseline underneath it gives way to a 16th note D flat major 7 arpeggio to ramp up the excitement and switch gears for the next section before we get to the next section though I want to talk a little bit about the first beat of the second bar at first I labeled it as an F minor chord moving to a B flat minor chord because technically that's what it is but I think it's better to label the whole bar as d flat because of two things firstly all of the notes fit into the d flat major 7 chord except for the B flat which we can say is just there for the purpose of keeping the original themes Melody intact secondly the run up in the base follows a dlat pentatonic scale so you can kind of hear it either way it simultaneously harmonizes the chords on top as a 361 in D flat and works purely as a dionic run up to d flat major neither is wrong but it moves so quick and the 361 is such a weak cord progression that I think it fits better to just consider the whole bar to be an elaboration on a d flat cord anyways after this section we move on to a nice antecedent consequence section that uses the intro's harmony to maintain a cohesive hole I'm just kidding this is where it gets really intense trying to decide what key to put this section in wasn't super easy I opted for F minor partially because of where it sits in the phrase and partially because the only real resolution that happens in the section lands on F minor But ultimately because that's just what feels the most Like Home to me but seeing as how half of the chords don't fit into functional F minor Harmony you could say it's debatable firstly let's establish the arrangement of this section we have a bass note hitting this Rhythm kind of low in the mix then we have a stado cord stab happening a little higher in the mix and then highest in the mix we have the 16th note [Music] line this line is kind of a combination of the other two parts because it always outlines the the exact same chord being played in the staccato accompaniment while accenting the same Rhythm that the base is laying down also I'd be remiss not to mention this fat drum beat now let's take a look at this harmony we have our ostensible one F minor moving to a two sus F over G this is already pretty weird I think uatu is trying to see how many chords he could make while moving the notes in the chords as little as possible if you look at them you see how each one changes by Just One semmit Tone giving us F minor to F to F minor to e augmented the way the base harmonizes these chords though changes them so instead we get an F minor F over g d flat major 7 and this thing okay so this is how I classify this chord E augmented is identical to both C augmented and a flat augmented because of the augmented chords symmetrical structure C is the dominant of F and raising the five on a dominant chord to add a little extra tension is very common especially in a minor key where the sharp five of the dominant chord already naturally occurs in the parent scale as the third of the minor one chord what's also very common especially in the Jazz Community is substituting the five chord with a flat 2 chord those guys just sub out everything for flat to don't they well this works so well because the voice leading that makes the 57:1 sound the way it does namely the 4 to3 and 7:1 motion is still intact in a flat 2 7:1 progression only the three and seven of the five chord are now the seven and three of the flat 2 chord we call this a trone substitution because the flat 2 is a trone away from the five chord the more you know so this C augmented over g flat is kind of a combination of both we have the Bas giving us a trone sub while the upper harmonies give us an augmented dominant the fact that this bar resolves back to our one chord supports this interpretation of the harmony now we're back to our established progression with an F minor to F overg before uatu takes the chromatic movement to another level by moving every part of this bar up a semitone giving us a g flat over a flat while bringing in the Lush string crochet this g flat over a flat moves two of its notes up a semitone this time to give us a G minor over a flat or an A flat major 7 sharp 11 sus two these slash cords which are just a Triad over a rout that is not the root of the Triad are also very common in jazz music they almost always relate to a more more typical chord label but the specific voicing gives them a really unique flavor we actually have quite a few cool examples in this piece the flat 7 over one or the F over G the sharp 4 augmented over one or the C augmented over g flat and the Minor 7 over one or the G minor over a flat anyways this G minor over a flat back to the F minor at the top isn't really a resolution in a traditional sense this whole piece is a great example of non-functional Harmony actually the chords issue a traditional framework in favor of a more abstract way of creating tension and release if functional Harmony is like a movie where our hero fights the baddy gets the girl and saves the day this piece is more like an art housee picture I hope you enjoyed me talking about a song for 10 times as long as it takes to actually listen to it and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 369,773

Keywords: Final Fantasy VII, Nobuo Uematsu, Victory Fanfare, Musical Analysis, Music Theory, Victory Theme, Final Fantasy 1, Video Game Music

Id: EH3RSAT3Asc

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2016