"Medea's Sonata" ~Vintage Original~ from Azhavela

24/05/2025 1 min
"Medea's Sonata" ~Vintage Original~ from Azhavela

Listen ""Medea's Sonata" ~Vintage Original~ from Azhavela"

Episode Synopsis

The music represented here is an example of some of the original compositions that I wrote in the late 90s in MIDI format. Similar to my Enhanced Game MIDIs, these works use general MIDI samples from my Yamaha Motif ES8 workstation keyboard. Although they were polished for presentation with expression and mixing tweaks, these songs overall maintain the Super Nintendo-inspired composition style that I produced years ago.

This peaceful tune is one of a few different area themes that I wrote for Azhavela, a cancelled game that was being developed by Mark Jordan and a few others from RPGamer. Azhavela was inspired by a text-based, fantasy adventure MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) on IRC by the name of Zhai'helleva, meaning "Wind to Thy Wings" in the Tayledras language of the Valdemar novel series.

You would hear this music in Saviour's Villa, the water shrine dedicated to a fallen hero that is struck periodically with lightning. The scroll above tells the story. Inspired by elegant Final Fantasy themes, I filled the piece with harp, strings, choir, and piano. I also wanted to add rain and thunder effects using applause and timpani respectively, considering the shrine's presence in the rainforest continent of Malone. Originally, the MIDI was called Medea's Requiem because of the hero's deceased status. But it was renamed later, since the composition really didn't have the signature elements of the church mass genre. In 2001, the track was unintentionally used for an MMO game at the time, but I retained the rights. Many small tweaks were made for this enhancement, such as diverse velocities in the drums with less percussion at the end, a bit more choir with minimal fade effects to prevent abrupt cuts, some adjustments to the ways the harp and music box play, and the removal of most thunder throughout, but the sequencing philosophy from 1998 generally was retained.

Disclaimer:
Story concept by Mark Jordan