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In "World of Ice" (ep. 9), there is music that starts off with something that sounds like a harpsichord, after Himari enters a hidden door in the library (around 6:11). Strings (mostly playing pizzicato, I think) and a clarinet come in later. Normally I'd assume that this might be something original created from the anime — for instance, I've heard stuff that could pass as classical music in the Monogatari Series.

However, I've noticed pieces that were clearly not original being used in this series, such as the beginning of Mozart's Piano Sonata K. 331 (when Himari is still in the normal section of the library), or the famous theme from Dvořák's 9th symphony (in "Because I love him"). Thus, it seems plausible that this is not original music.

What is the music playing here? I tried to look up the soundtrack or the episode on the fan-made wiki, but neither gave a full listing. Is this original music, and if not, where is this music from?

Update: If I'm not mistaken, the same track appears in the first half of ep. 21 ("The Door of Fate We Choose"). This would suggest to me that it's more likely to be original music, but I'm not even completely sure right now if it's the same music.

Update 2: I tried to search Musipedia, which largely is a classical music identification site, for the beginning of this section of the soundtrack and came up with no results that seemed correct. I also listened to this section of "World of Ice" a second time and it struck me as less "Baroque" and "classical" than I initially thought. Original music seems more likely, but I'm still having trouble obtaining the title of this music. (It's definitely nothing listed on this Tumblr.)

Maroon
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  • If you're referring to the scene when Himari is in the Library, then I heard that piece of music used in a Japanese TV program (non-anime) 5 minutes ago, so it's propably not original music. –  Apr 05 '16 at 11:45
  • @orerawaningenda: might you know which TV program (and which episode) it was? Assuming it's indeed the same piece of music, I could do with an additional source to transcribe the melody from – Maroon Apr 05 '16 at 17:11
  • @orerawaningenda: if you're referring to [this piece](https://youtu.be/Maacr-M79EY), this is probably not what I'm looking for; it appears before the segment I'm interested in. IIRC the style is notably different from the Mozart, but I'll need to have another listen to make sure. – Maroon Apr 05 '16 at 19:52

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I finally managed to dig up the track that I wanted after I listened to a number of Penguindrum-related uploads on SoundCloud; it was listed as "Karei. Sora No Ana Bunshitsu". From some more searching, it appears that this can be found on the bonus CD of vol. 3 of the Blu-Ray. This all indicates that this was probably an original composition.

I'm unfortunately still having trouble figuring out what the original Japanese name of this track is; English websites so-far have only given romaji transcriptions of the title, and searches for "そらのあなぶんしつ" thus far have not yielded any particularly promising results. (It does not help that I don't really know Japanese.)

Maroon
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    The Japanese title is 「華麗・そらの孔分室」. cf. [this album's VGMdb entry](http://vgmdb.net/album/30701). The use of 孔 for _ana_ is weird, which is probably why you didn't find anything. Googling for "そらの孔" gives you pretty much only Penguindrum stuff. "Sora no Ana" is "Hole in the Sky", as in the giant library where Himari runs into Sanetoshi for the first time. Anything in particular you're looking for? I can Japanese-google around a bit for you. – senshin Apr 05 '16 at 21:34
  • @senshin: thanks. I somehow ended up with both 空の穴分室 and 空の孔分室 (the latter which Google suggested as a correction to the former, and occasionally came up as "そらの孔（あな）分室"), and I couldn't tell which was more "correct". I mostly just wanted to give an approximate gloss in English for the title, really. – Maroon Apr 05 '16 at 23:18