LogFAQs > #985550439

keyblader1985 posted...

Ideas like that certainly sound plausible, but I often wonder whether they're actually accurate and that was truly the intent when the music was written. But I suppose that's probably why they call it music theory.

That applies to a lot of artistic analysis. People often find thematic parallels in art that might not have been intended by the artist, or sometimes even which the artist explicitly denies including.

Where music is almost always pretty abstract (especially non-vocal stuff), there's a lot of room to speculate about what feelings are evoked by a given motif, often going well beyond what the composer themselves consciosuly thought about. Even if the composer didn't try to represent any particular idea, though, they likely made the choice to include that motif because it evoked the feeling they wanted to express, and subsequent analysis of that feeling may find that it's representative of/represented by a more concrete idea.

In this case, I would guess that Kondo didn't specifically think "I want all of these arpeggios to land on the same high root because it's like a lighthouse." However, he probably was aware that consistently landing on the root makes pieces feel more stable and grounded and liked the vibe of working that into a piece that was meant to accompany water levels (which specifically are not grounded) and otherwise felt kind of floaty and ethereal (with the reverb, sustain, dynamic ebb and flow, and syncopation). From there, the abstract idea of something stable and grounded existing amid something floaty and ethereal is well-represented by a lighthouse, so the analysis effectively picks up on the correct themes and vibes, regardless of whether or not that was actually Kondo's intent.