Dark Convictions - for wind ensemble
Year: 2022
Grade: 5
Duration: ca. 8:00
Purchase: currently under exclusivity
Recording: New York University Wind Symphony | Harrison J. Collins, Conductor
P.S.: If you can tell me the specific Pokémon series musical track whose opening measure is quoted in this work’s opening measure, you will receive, uh, my undying admiration and loyalty. I can’t afford monetary awards.
Dark Convictions is a product of my life-long love of video games. It was conceived as part of the Let's Play consortium, a project that my colleagues in the Aurora Tapestry Collective—Kevin Day, Josh Trentadue, and Katahj Copley—and I created together in which we each composed a work inspired by video games and our experiences with them. Each of the four of us grew up playing them, and we all shared a desire to translate the joy and inspiration we have taken from our favorite video games and genres into new, high-quality, interesting, and unique works for band.
I chose to write music inspired by RPGs—Role Playing Games. There are countless RPG video games to be found, but one of the most popular examples—and one of my dearest favorites—is the Pokémon series. I've played various entries in the long-lived Pokémon series since I was as young as seven or eight years old, and I have always adored them; I've also always adored their soundtracks, making them an immediately strong candidate to me for inspiring a work of music. But given how broad the horizons of the series have stretched over the years, I knew I'd need to focus in further. What I decided on is one of my favorite consistent features of the game: the evil organizations and the people that run them. As the player character, we serve as the major force of "good" in the games, and we need an evil to balance that—in the core series Pokémon games, this is given to us in the form of a "Team" of evildoers (by far the most popular one being the original Team Rocket, thanks to the TV series), with plenty of grunts, a few stronger and more authoritative admins, and somebody at the top who masterminds the operation. This leader at the top typically has an evil goal of massive scale to enact, and as we continue coming in conflict with their group, we will eventually face them directly to thwart this goal. Each side, good and bad, is backed by their own convictions; and we must attempt to prove ours stronger.
Guided by this unique-but-consistent setting of the idea of good vs. evil, Dark Convictions is "evil music". It depicts, in no particularly programmatic way, the enigmatic person at the top of a theoretical evil organization dedicated to doing bad and causing harm; through music, we wind our way through the twisted actions and thoughts of a dark mind with goals of catastrophic proportions, exploring potentially tragic origins and motivations along the way. We eventually reach a bombastic and dark self-celebration of evil, concluding with a wild maniacal laugh as our leader continues forth to achieve their baleful goals, guided by their dark convictions.