This is an organ voluntary version of @Phyrnna's La plaisanterie savante, a theme that once featured in the Grand Gallery area of Epic Battle Fantasy 5. Phyrnna once told me that she has a fondness for the pipe organ, and she asked if I could arrange La plaisanterie savante for the organ. At the time, I was still under the nonprofit constraint of being an asylum seeker, but also actually fairly lucky to be able to access a pipe organ, let alone on the regular, so I was happy to oblige.

This request of hers stewed in my head for at least two years, I think. The overwhelming thought in my head was, how do I even write an organ voluntary??? I knew how to play according to the hymnal, and arrange chord progressions in the style of things found in hymnals. It turned out that I needed to immerse myself in the music that I was playing a lot more before I could improvise this thing.

Then, in early 2022, my chance came. Pixel Mixers announced to its members that it was doing an Indie Games Vol. 3 album, and the prerequisite for anyone submitting tracks was that they needed to be from games that were no more than five years old. Epic Battle Fantasy 5 was released in 2018, making it only four years old at the time of the announcement. My chance had finally come. I would finally fulfil my promise to Phyrnna to arrange this.

I was an hour at the organ, trying to get it to feel right. Then when I was finally happy with the way I had arranged the piece, I took two separate recording takes, and then decided to choose this take as it was the smoother of the two. The organ was only partially functional; for the handful of you out there who are organists, I normally use a bourdon (16") on the pedals. At the time of recording, the bourdon wasn't working at all and the bass flute (8") was barely functional, so I had to make do with what I had.

Recorded in the first quarter of 2022 on the organ at St Maria Goretti's, Preston, one of the parishes I currently serve as a music director.

Sheet music.

The video of this voluntary, capturing my hands, can be viewed here.

All links to The Great Tale of The Little Ones Vol. 3 can be found here.

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