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• 1 media/pokemon lavender town.jpg 2016-10-24T11:11:20-07:00 Lavender Town 12 How do fans reinterpret Pokemon's spookiest theme? image_header 2016-12-06T11:13:33-08:00 The music for Lavender Town is among the most infamous in the Pokemon series. Beginning in the first generation games, the town featured infamously "spooky" music, using atonal and multitonal harmonies. It fit the atmosphere of the town, a location for a gravesite for dead Pokemon that was crawling with "ghost type" characters like Gastly, Haunter and Gengar. In the game, the character encounters these Pokemon as well as mediums who battle using Ghost-types, and must do battle against the ghost of another dead Pokemon. These associations combined with the unsettling music to create lots of online urban legends (called "creepypastas") related to the location, and especially its music. 
  
  The Gold, Silver and Crystal games removed the creepier elements of the Lavender Town plot and likewise, made the music less unsettling, adding major tonalities that gave it a more lullaby-like feeling. The remakes of each game followed suit, with re-orchestrated versions of each theme. Most fan transcriptions are based on the "infamous" original version.
  
  Here is a video that shows the various versions of the Lavender Town theme:
  
  
  
  Fans who attempt to do a stricter transcription of the Lavender Town theme usually arrange it for piano, as in the case of user "Bespinben" who uploaded a piano transcription to the archive NinSheetMusic.org (short for "Nintendo Sheet Music").
  
  
  
  I also found some fan arrangements for other instrument groups. An anonymous user of MuseScore.com includes an arrangement for glockenspiel, tubular bells, hand bells and piano. It can be found here and has the option of listening to it. The choice of tubular bells is interesting in light of their use in the fifth movement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, where they are also used to sound like church bells in connection with death/funerals. (Their playing immediately precedes the first appearance of the Dies Irae theme.) If the fan arranger was not influenced by Berlioz, they are likely influenced by the many uses of tubular bells in film music as signifiers of the supernatural and the macabre, also due to their similarities to funerary church bells.
  
  This is particularly interesting given that this is distinctly different from the macabre/supernatural influences over the Lavender Town music. The church bells/funeral connection is a distinctly Western, Christian construct, while Lavender Town's supernatural elements are non-Christian, most closely influenced by Japan's native Shinto traditions. (Christians only make up a tiny minority of the Japanese population, and the "Kanto" region in which Lavender Town resides is based on the real-life region of Japan by the same name.) This shows how players, either out of ignorance or deliberately, can bring their own life experiences and cultural backgrounds into their interpretations of this music. It is truly a "reinterpretation," whether the arranger intended it or not, and serves as a form of both creative and curative fandom.
  
  
  Many Lavender Town transcriptions seem less specifically connected to the timbres suggested in the music. These seem to be designed either for fans to experiment with timbres, or to allow them to play the music with their friends. One example is this French horn and tuba arrangement found on MuseScore.
  
  
  
  Another is this version for piano and cello. The interesting thing to me is the unusual use of each voice. The ambiguous nature of the "melody" in the Lavender Town theme means the piano voice is often the dominant one, whereas music for solo instruments with piano accompaniment typically put the focus on the solo instrument. I wonder if this was a deliberate stylistic choice or, again, influenced by the individuals the composer had in mind writing the music. Maybe the cellist they wrote it for was a beginner, and needed a simpler line to play.
  
  
  One of the interesting things about the Lavender Town transcriptions is the relative agreement about what the "correct" notes and rhythms are. This is not the case with some of the other transcriptions, as can be seen on their pages, where players add embellishments that are not in other players' versions. This may be due to the relatively straightforward, consistent rhythmic quality of the Lavender Town theme.
  
  There are exceptions, however. This version for strings, piano and English horn inverts the melodic pattern of most of the other transcription. On the MuseScore page, commenter DatMonOvarDere chastises the user with "This is completely off! The theme is C,G, B, F#!" On the note of this user's orchestration, it is hard to tell if the user is focused more on playing with their friends (since it such an unusual ensemble) or on replicating the music (the sound of the English horn could easily be the "melody" instrument of the Lavender Town theme, but the violas and cello seem low for the high ostinato in the "background").
  
  
  
  Lavender Town also has various fan rearrangements and remixes, more so than other Pokemon cues. This is a piano roll version of one of the more popular ones on YouTube:
  
  
  
  It also includes various fan "how to play this music" tutorials: