Assault of the Silver Dragons
Final Fantasy IX
Nobuo Uematsu
One of the finest pieces of Final Fantasy music, this plays as you approach a particular story boss in IX, even replacing the battle music for encounters in this period.
While percussion does keep the beat, the forward momentum mainly comes from a repeating four-bar melodic phrase in the strings section, while the brass plays a slow, dignified melody.
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Music is all about repetition, but this piece takes it to the extreme without being annoying. The main driving force is a four-bar melody from the strings, the percussion doesn't change much, and the main melody is an occasionally-repeated slow brass line only six bars long. Very little changes between repetitions, yet Uematsu manages to make this an _interesting_ feature, not a boring one.
It's a fascinating technique.