Stray - Untitled (Atonal VGM on Accordion)
14While studying music composition in college I was fascinated with the concept of atonal and serial music. Understandably, you rarely get the opportunity to hear it as VGM, so the second I experienced this unique piece while playing Stray I knew I must cover it, and there's no better time than April 1st to do so.
Title: Untitled
Composer: Yann van der Cruyssen
Game: Stray (2022)
This piece uses all twelve pitches and starts off playing them all in a predetermined sequence (known in Serial music as a "tone row"), though it does not appear to use a matrix of those tones to derive the rest of the pitch sequences in the piece. I can't say with 100% certainty if the piece is "total serialism", but the length, range, and dynamics of the pitches in this piece are certainly varied enough to fit the style.
I did my best to capture all 44 notes on accordion, but there may be some slight inconsistencies from the original (most notably the microtones). I also took a couple small liberties with the arrangement to make the piece playable on piano accordion (such as moving some pitches down an octave), though a freebass CBA player could probably get a bit closer to the original.
You can check out the sheet music for this arrangement here:
https://github.com/bvavra/vgm-accordion-sheets/blob/main/Stray/Stray%20-%20Untitled%20-%20Solo%20Accordion.pdf