A warm welcome to everyone who is reading this. This is part 1 in a series of posts about the history of Touhou style music as a genre. Before we begin, i would like to give an important and quite serious pre-ramble, in order to set the correct tone for this post. Actually, there will be multiple pre-rambles, because i value clarity and avoiding confusion. Before we begin, i also want to make it very clear that i have a lot of respect for all the people i am writing about, none of this is intended to be inflamatory or negative.

My name is Princess Sylvysprit, a professional video game music composer who started their career from composing Touhou style music (since 2011 without SD-90, since 2012 with SD-90) and then branching off from there. I feel like it's important to give that context about myself before we continue this story. The reason i wanted to give that context is because i want to make it clear that despite my long history and reputation among Touhou style music enjoyers, that i do not consider myself a "definitive authority" on the subject matter. I believe in art (and thus music) as a cultural experience beyond national borders or qualifications, i believe everyone is capable of creating Touhou style music, no matter where you are from or what tools you own. There are some people who look up to me who consider me an "authority" on this matter because of their positive bias towards me. There are some people who look down on me who don't consider me an "authority" on this matter because of their negative bias towards me. Today, i am asking you, the person who is reading this; Let go of your previous notions about me. I want to write about Touhou style music in order to preserve history that might otherwise be lost forever. I cannot gurrantea that i will be 100% correct about everything, but i will try my best to not let my own personal bias get in the way of the truth. That said though; it is important to acknowledge that i will sometimes have opinions about things, so that's why i do not want you to read this story with the idea that i am an "authority" on this subject matter. I am NOT an "authority" on this subject matter, and in fact, i firmly believe it's for the best to not consider anyone an "authority" on this, no matter their reputation, no matter their legacy, no matter how much respect you have for them. I am writing this article as an equal, an equal to you, and an equal to all my fellow Touhou style composers, with the express intent of helping to preserve history and my firsthand experience within some of that shared history.

To start, let's go over the term "Touhou style". On the surface level, "Touhou style" music are original compositions (or arrangements) that are inspired by Touhou Project, created by ZUN. I say "on the surface level", because there is a lot of nuance to unpack here. Before 2019, "Touhou style" as a genre term, internationally, was considered mostly interchangeable with the term "ZUN style". But in 2019, Touhou style composer Tokini11, one of the most prominent Touhou style composers from the People's Republic of China, published a post challenging the previously understood common interpretation of the term. While i do not agree with everything that Tokini11 discussed in his post (primarily when it comes to the neccessary components of what makes a song Touhou style, and when it comes to Tokini11's more nation-state based observation regarding the interpretation of tendencies to stick to either ZUN style or Touhou style, which i personally find to be a narrow observation, considering the many examples of Japanese Touhou style composers not sticking to purely ZUN style, i don't feel like it's fair to the individual artists and their artistic expression to group them together within a nation-state based lens, it diminishes the importance of analysing each artist's contribution to the genre as individuals), i think Tokini11 raised an exccellent point about how we interpret what it means for something to be Touhou style music. While there might have been others before Tokini11 to raise these points, i feel like Tokini11 managed to convey them in such a way that was far clearer than before, and for a wider audience as well. This marked the start of more discussions regarding the interpretation of what Touhou style is as a genre. Personally, i view Touhou style as a genre seperately from ZUN, the creator, just like how we don't call classical music "Bach style" or rock music "Elvis style", the term "Touhou style" is a term that is currently increasingly questioned. The main issue is obviously that the term "Touhou style" is too linked to the franchise of Touhou Project, which is owned by ZUN, meaning that even if Touhou style music as a genre moves forward beyond ZUN style music, it is difficult to seperate it from Touhou Project as a franchise or ZUN as an individual, unlike with other music genre names as mentioned before, there is no widely agreed upon "generic term" for Touhou style as a genre seperate from the associations with Touhou Project or ZUN. There have been attempts to "decouple" Touhou style from associations with Touhou Project or ZUN, but there is no widely agreed upon community consensus on such a term yet. Terms like "Metroidvania" share a similair problem for example (tied closely to existing franchises rather than a term that encompasses the whole genre). Therefore, for the purpose of clarity, we will be using the term "Touhou style" for this post and its potential follow-ups, but i want to make it clear that i intend to discuss the history of this genre beyond the traditional associations with Touhou Project and/or ZUN.

Touhou style music as a genre is commonly believed to have started on 13 October 2007 with 東方っぽいオリジナル曲ができたわけですが by L*aura（ローラ）. While this is obviously a classic, and L*aura（ローラ） deserves much respect as one of the original pioneers of the genre, i find it is difficult to consider this to be the definitive first song of the overall genre as a whole. In 2004, ZUN released Touhou 7.5: Immaterial and Missing Power, a spinoff fighting game that was developed in collaboration with the studio Twilight Frontier. For the game's soundtrack, ZUN composed 3 songs, but the other songs for the game's soundtrack were composed by U2 Akiyama and NKZ. The reason i bring this up is because i'd like you to listen to Broken Moon again please. This song, composed in 2004, is an original composition by U2 Akiyama (as shown by the credits), and could arguably be classified as a Touhou style song. This song uses the SD-90 Romantic Tp, a chord progression that ZUN often uses, the song is in a key that ZUN often uses, a tempo that ZUN often uses, and the main melody feels like something that wouldn't be out of place either, in both the timing of the notes and the distances between them. Touhou style music doesn't nessecerily need SD-90 Romantic Tp to be considered Touhou style of course, but it does help to more easily "place" it in a more recogniseable area of what is commonly associated with the "feeling" of when something is considered Touhou style music by casual and/or new listeners. ZUN did not compose that song, so could it be considered a Touhou style song? It's understandable if you might not agree at a first glance, after all, this song is part of an official Touhou game, even if it's not composed by ZUN, Broken Moon is an official part of the Touhou franchise. But there is a difference between Touhou style music as a genre and Touhou as a franchise. Even if U2 Akiyama intended for the song to sound like ZUN style, Touhou style as an umbrella term still encompasses ZUN style as well. But that begs the question; does a Touhou style song have to be "fanmade" in order to be considered a part of the genre? Where would you draw that line personally? Personally, i believe that wether a Touhou style song is fanmade or not doesn't have to come into play when it comes to differentiating if a song can be considered Touhou style or not. Theoretically speaking, that means that i even consider ZUN himself to be a part of the Touhou style genre, but i feel like that perspective makes analysing a start date of the birth of the genre more difficult. Therefore, i would like to argue that the birth of Touhou style as a genre cannot have been considered a genre before more than 1 person (ZUN) participated in it. By that logic, i think the earliest we can consider a starting date for the birth of Touhou style as a genre to be when U2 Akiyama composed his portion of original compositions for the Immaterial and Missing Power soundtrack in 2004. Altough, we do not know the exact date at which each song was composed, so we cannot pinpoint an exact specific date unfortunately. I know that there might be some people who might disagreee with me on placing 2004 as the starting date for the birth of the genre. Some could argue that the intention of U2 Akiyama when composing these songs for the OST also comes into play. Here, i would like to refer to my previously established pre-ramble, where i go over the importance of the seperation of Touhou style music as a genre from Touhou as a franchise and ZUN as an individual. I believe that, regardless of intent, a song can be classified as Touhou style. If it breathes like Touhou style, if it sounds like Touhou style, if it feels like Touhou style...? ...Then it's Touhou style, that's what i think. The names of genres and their classifications have always been contentious and subjective thorough music history. Let's take "breakcore" for example, this term has a long and complicated history, no one can truly agree what "breakcore" is, and no one has the authority to decide it either. There is no "authority" that can decide what is and isn't part of a music genre, because classification and words in general are all just made up concepts that we choose to believe in order to communicate with each other, it is a part of how our society manages to function; the unwritten social contract of the common interpretation of the meaning of language. Even if it wasn't U2 Akiyama's intent for songs like Broken Moon to be Touhou style, i feel like it is even more difficult to argue that it is not Touhou style. So, the year is 2004, and wether you agree or disagree, the first Touhou style compositions beyond ZUN as an individual now exist.

But what about the early pioneers of the genre beyond the official Touhou franchise? Before 2007, there were multiple Touhou fans that experimented with adding original melodies to their fan arrangements of official Touhou songs. Of course, the intended genres of these fan arranges varied wildly, so it is difficult to consider them to be part of Touhou style as a genre on the surface. But i'd like to argue that, at least in composition, some of these new melody lines, which are already using the chords and other elements from ZUN's original work in order to arrange them, arguably have elements inside of them that can be considered to be partial examples of Touhou style genre composition, i feel like Kil / Kil6969's works of this era (September 2006 for this example) contain some minor examples of this, not in terms of instrumentation, but in the ways the new melodies and/or variations on melodies are written, it can be considered a sort of proto-Touhou style in a way, at least in some of its compositional elements.

With the previous sections of this post, my goal has been to attempt to broaden the common understanding of the concept of what is and is not considered to be Touhou style as a music genre. Even if you disagreed with it, i feel like it is important to stay open minded about how we perceive the commonly accepeted truth, lest we drown in a new reality we can no longer perceive ourselves because our eyes and ears are still too used to the old one, unable to adapt to the possibility of a new perception. That said, i believe now is a good time to start talking about the next step of the evolution of the genre; the era where Touhou style music becomes an explicit goal outside of the official franchise, beyond subtle implication. This is the era where the pioneers of Touhou style music started to define Touhou style music as a genre, not in a commonly agreed upon theoretical definition of the genre, but through experimentation and results that would set the groundwork for all what came after. As we discussed before, this is where 東方っぽいオリジナル曲ができたわけですが by L*aura（ローラ） enters the scene. It's a nostalgic sounding song that clearly, despite not using SD-90 instruments, is aiming for compositional elements that clearly resemble ZUN's music in Touhou, for example the way the overall structure, melody, chords, countermelodies, and drum lines are written here, are all clearly done so with the intent of aiming for a style close to ZUN's music. Next, let's talk about さみだれ (Samidare). Samidare was one of the biggest pioneers of Touhou style music as a genre, his contributions cannot be understated. He started out making transcriptions of Touhou songs on 13 October 2007, and on 2 December 2007, impressively, he managed to transcribe the long version of Wind God Girl (6 min+) from Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red. Strictly speaking, there aren't any explicit new original elements inside of this transcription, but the experience gained from this transcription would lead to something remarkable; On 9 June 2008, Samidare uploaded his newest transcription of 有頂天変　～ Wonderful Heaven, Tenshi's theme from the recently released official Touhou spinoff game; Touhou 10.5: Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. I'd like you to listen to it carefully please. From the beginning, the transcription is quite wonderfully accurate and by the books. Until all of sudden, at 02:27... Everything changes. This is not a mere transcription anymore. This is a new original addition that wasn't in the original song before. 04:12 even adds a wonderful new piano solo segment, with a new trumpet line that uses the lower notes of the trumpet's main melody notes, likely inspired by Necrofantasy from Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom. Arguably, these new elements could be interpreted as simply being an arrangement, and not a part of the foundations for a new music genre. But i feel like it is important to give context to what happened after this, because what happened next is a historical event for Touhou style as a genre. On 8 November 2008, Samidare uploaded 東方風オリジナル曲「４面以降のBOSSっぽい曲」を作ってみた, his first fully original Touhou style composition from start to finish. While there have been attempts by others as well at this time, i feel like it is Samidare's experience with his transcriptions of ZUN's official Touhou works, and his experimentation with adding original elements to them, that gradually led up to this point, and thus, i consider the previous transcriptions an important part of the history of how we got here in the first place. What makes this song special when compared to L*aura（ローラ）'s earlier work from 2007 isn't just Samidare's usage of the Edirol SD-20 here (a cheaper variation of the Edirol SD-90, ZUN's primary music hardware at the time) to achieve a sound that is closer to the official Touhou franchise, but his deeper understanding and experience of what makes the composition of a Touhou style song actually feel like Touhou style. Important elements that would become recogniseable staples of the genre were more clearly established in this song, of special note here is the emphasis on the way key changes are handled. Another recogniseble halmark of Touhou style as a genre shows its face at 02:21, the piano solo/fast piano background melodies. Of course, not every Touhou style song needs to have key changes or piano solos nowadays, but in this early era where Touhou style as a genre was still closely tied to ZUN (because it was just beginning to form), i think it's understandable that this more "familiar" ZUN style was chosen as a goal here. That said though, despite Samidare clearly aiming for a style close to ZUN, one cannot help but notice his own original flair shining through as well, which is important to emphasise, because these are the seeds that will eventually take Touhou style as a genre beyond its original creator.

2008 would prove to be a defining year for the history of Touhou style music, but how would the genre evolve next? In the next part, i would like to talk about the transitional period from the first steps of the genre towards a new future, with tons of new familiar faces entering the picture; Partially thanks to L*aura（ローラ） and Samidare proving that making Touhou style music was possible, more and more people decided to give it a try. What followed was a period of (relative) strong initial growth in interest for Touhou style music on Niconico, the ball has officially started rolling, and it was only going to get bigger from here. The foundations have been laid by the early pioneers, and in the next part, we will talk about the excited newcommers that would prove to become the pillars of the growth of the genre, creating many classic Touhou style songs that are still beloved today. Amongst them include people like FD, 桐生 (Kiryu), Wanwan, Yosiyosi, Pesot.jp, 深蒼穹 (Misora), and 戦ピー (Senpi). I want to take my time to properly talk about each of these composers and how they influenced the history of Touhou style music. So for now, we'll be sticking to the era of Touhou style music before it spread overseas. Eventually, i might get around to covering that post-2011 era of Touhou style music (we'll probably talk about Anunsew Imprecise, Mana Kazami, Toby Fox (yes really), and maybe even a very small section about myself (and maybe others too of course)), but let's not get ahead of ourselves, the next chapter will be about the 2008-2011 era and the composers that put their mark on Touhou style music history forever.

Thank you for reading all of this. It's okay if we don't agree on everything, but i hope that i helped you learn something new today, or at least perhaps made you consider something from a new perspective. I wish you a very good night and sweet dreams! The next part can be found here! (...Except it's not out yet, so i will update that link later when it's out okay? Please wait warmly)