Yuna’s Decision

Yuna’s Decision (also known as Yuna’s Determination) is an incidental music piece composed by Nobuo Uematsu and Junya Nakano for the video game Final Fantasy X. It accompanies the Calm Plains location.

Yuna’s Decision is full of voice-overlapping goodness! When I first started this arrangement I was faced with the challenge of how to best notate the left hand, as it crosses into the treble register many times. To change clefs would occupy horizontal space, and to use cross-staff beaming would confuse the hand distribution of notes. For this arrangement, I have decided to accommodate explicit hand distribution to the two staffs since each hand is already so busy with multiple voices. That is, throughout the piece, if a note is written in the upper staff, it is for the right hand, otherwise it is for the left hand. There is no notation to indicate this, but rather, it is usually up to the pianist to figure out.

When we get to m.16 (0:33), things get interesting with the addition of a countermelody indicated by the small notes. In the original, this line is sounded by a slow-strings synth, so during performance, the performer should adopt an exaggerated legato style if possible. That is, to keep the previous note held down for some extra duration while you play the next note.