Koji Kondo’s favorite cadence
March 24, 2008
Inspired by Michael Abbott’s post on music in the Legend of Zelda series, I’ve been working up harmonic analyses for the songs Link learns to play in Ocarina of Time. I’ll post the whole thing when it’s ready, but in the meantime I wanted to share something interesting I noticed about Koji Kondo’s harmonic palette. (If you’re not a music person, you may want to pass on this one.)
Below are three bare-bones transcriptions of Ocarina songs along with MP3s. Above each staff I’ve indicated what the names of the chords are, and below I’ve done Roman numeral analysis of how they function.1 Click any of the images to make them larger.
“Minuet of Forest”:
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“Serenade of Water”:
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“Nocturne of Shadow”:
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We’ll tackle these in more depth in a later post, but for now just take a look at the Roman numeral analysis. Each piece, you’ll notice, ends with the chord progression ♭VI-♭VII-I. (“Nocturne” actually ends with two repetitions of it.) In musical terms, all three pieces have the same cadence, or musical resolution.
Now, to be fair, the ♭VI-♭VII-I cadence isn’t unheard of. I can think of three songs that use it off the top of my head — “P.S. I Love You” by The Beatles, “Steady As She Goes” by The Raconteurs, and “Señorita” by Chick Corea & Béla Fleck — and I’ve come across it on several other occasions. At the same time, it’s not exactly a popular standby, either. Unlike I-IV-V-IV or I-vi-IV-V,2 which are so common that they’ve become cliché, ♭VI-♭VII-I is an unusual enough progression that its repeated use can only be a conscious stylistic choice.
With that in mind, let’s now look at a snip from the Super Mario Bros. theme, composed about a decade earlier:
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As you can see, it’s the same cadence — perhaps Kondo’s first time using it in a Nintendo game soundtrack. He seems to have liked the sound of it, too; it made the jump from the upbeat, calypso-tinged Mario music to the mournful warp pieces in Ocarina of Time.
It’s an interesting quirk, but let’s take it one step further and look at another Nintendo composer.
Mahito Yokota wrote most of the music for Super Mario Galaxy, under Kondo’s supervision. He initially tried to capture what he called “the essence of Mario” by writing a Latin groove, like the original Super Mario Bros. music. Kondo rejected his music as too cutesy; he told Yokota that Mario music needed to be “cool”:3
I had always worked on composing music based on what I thought was cool at that moment in time. For the Mario games on the SNES and the Nintendo 64, I composed the music thinking about what kind of music was popular, and what was going on in the world at the time. I composed music that I thought sounded cool at the time, and I made them fit the visuals of Mario games.
After Kondo’s rejection, Yokota went back to work. Here’s a snip of his theme for the Gusty Garden Galaxy, with my quick harmonic analysis:
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Wouldn’t you know it? That progression has made its way into Yokota’s music as well.
As it turns out, the upshot of Kondo writing whatever he thought “sounded cool at the time” is that Mario music has become associated with his personal style, from his broad range of influences to his idiosyncratic touches — like his affinity for the ♭VI-♭VII-I cadence.
Nintendo’s trademark sound transcends media. The bleeps and bloops of the 8-bit Super Mario Bros. theme are just as iconic as the sequenced Ocarina of Time tracks or the orchestrated Super Mario Galaxy music. Koji Kondo deserves enormous credit for that.
- Fellow music theory nerds will notice that I’ve made assumptions about missing thirds here and there, and that I didn’t pay much attention to chord voicings and inversions — these are quick and dirty transcriptions, since I’m really just after harmonic progressions here. I’d love to hear your corrections and suggestions (especially if you have any ideas about the chromatic parallel fourths in “Nocturne”).
- The former is the progression from “Louie, Louie”; the latter is the progression from “In the Still of the Night” (and most other doo-wop songs).
- You can read the full story, including Kondo’s quote, in the interview Yokota and Kondo did with Nintendo president Saturo Iwata.
22 comments
This is simply wonderful, Dan. What a terrific and useful analysis. I don’t have the musical chops to parse Kondo’s work in the way you do, so I’m especially grateful for your thinking on this. I look forward to seeing where you go next.
Kondo deserves so much credit. He seems to be getting more of it lately, but mostly in the form of fan awareness (which is nice), but I’m hoping for more serious critical scrutiny of his work like this.
by Michael Abbott on March 24, 2008 at 10:25 pm #
Hey Dan,
Quite a nice Roman Numeral analysis – I’m always partial to functional harmony analysis – it reminds me of my 1st year at Uni… good times. Let me just say that I think you’ve identified the “Zelda Cadence” and henceforth, I shall identify it as such, and attribute it to you. =)
You asked for a second opinion on the parallel 4ths in the Nocturne of Shadow – I’d like to say I had a better idea, but I can only suggest he’s putting a chromatic scale in the L.H. against the melody in the R.H. Good call on leaving out a key sig. for the 1st 4 bars. It seems to me like the melody, while being somewhat dissonant (A over G Cb anyone?) accentuates the 4ths – the same A moves to a D, which could be acting as an inverted 4th.
Gah, it’s so hard to work out intervals without writing it out on paper – I should just do it, but It’s all the way over there and I’m over here and… you get the picture.
Keep em comin’!
by Ben Abraham on March 24, 2008 at 11:06 pm #
OH! And i forgot to mention, I looked at this article first while I was at work, and on IE – sorry to break your trend. ;)
by Ben Abraham on March 24, 2008 at 11:44 pm #
Forgive me for posting off-topic, but I just found your great little blog, with a nice shout-out to my blog, Theory Fighter. I just want to say your blog is already going better than mine. Great work!
by David Or on March 27, 2008 at 1:35 am #
Michael: Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad that there’s an audience for this kind of thing. You’re right that we could stand to have more serious critical scrutiny of video game music. Maybe it’s a nice I could fill with this blog. Could it be a regular feature in the making? :)
Ben: I hadn’t noticed that the “Nocturne” melody plays with fourths also — good catch. The most striking thing to me is how dissonant the F sounds in the second and fourth bars. It’s coincident with a Ab-Db fourth, which creates a perfectly ordinary Db major triad. In context, though, it sounds terrifying!
Anyway, I’ll have much more to say about the Ocarina songs in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.
Oh, and David — glad you like the blog, but you’re too modest. I always enjoy reading Theory Fighter. Keep it up! :)
by Dan Bruno on March 27, 2008 at 3:32 pm #
Since you mentioned whether people would want to ‘pass’ on this entry, I thought I’d delurk for a moment. I stumbled across this by accident, and I’m not that into Nintendo or the intricate terminology and organization of ‘music theory’, but I still found this very interesting, informative, and quite cool. I may have to look into this field further, now that I know it can be applied in less rigid ways. ^_^
by M. Nestor on April 4, 2008 at 10:13 pm #
M. Nestor: I appreciate the delurking! It’s good to know what sorts of posts people find interesting.
Also, I highly recommend pursuing music theory. It seems dry on the surface, but it’s a lot of fun. :)
by Dan Bruno on April 4, 2008 at 11:14 pm #
Weird. I was just noodling around on the keyboard yesterday and started playing the theme from Legend of Zelda, noticing that it shifts from major to minor in the third bar. As far as the melody is concerned, though, it’s in a major scale with… wait for it… a minor (or flat) 6th and 7th. (I’m sure there’s a name for that, but I never bothered with the largely useless act of memorizing the labels.) I would have just forgotten about it, but today I see this post randomly linked from Neojaponisme. Wacky.
by Hidarinoji on April 5, 2008 at 1:09 am #
Great article, beautiful music. Thanks.
Dan, or anyone else: do you have any recommendations of resources for beginning learning music theory? I don’t play; several years of piano lessons taught me to bang out a few songs but I never felt like I *got* it and as a result I’ve never been interested in anything but listening, which I do lots of. But me and my programmer brain which wants to understand things from first principles (if not in practice, at least potentially, in theory) have always wanted to learn more.
by Grady Haynes on April 12, 2008 at 11:04 pm #
Hidarinoji: The scale you’re thinking of (major third with minor sixth and seventh) is melodic minor. If I remember correctly, the Zelda theme plays with minor/major interchange a bit…maybe I’ll cover it in a later music analysis post. Good catch on finding the flat sixth and seventh elsewhere — maybe this is more widespread than I thought!
Grady: I’m glad you enjoyed the article. I’ve heard a lot of good things about the lessons on Musictheory.net. Since I was lucky enough to have a very theory-centric music teacher when I was little, I unfortunately can’t recommend anything from personal experience. Giving Musictheory.net a cursory glance right now, though, it looks pretty impressive. My only suggestion is go through the lessons with a piano or keyboard nearby, if at all possible — it’s easy to get lost in the academic side of music theory and forget to apply the ideas to actual music. Good luck!
by Dan Bruno on April 13, 2008 at 12:27 pm #
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the classic level-completion music of Super Mario Bros. is simply nothing more than an arpeggiation of this cadence, too.
by Nathan McCoy on January 25, 2009 at 1:52 am #
And here I thought I was the only one who analyzed the music theory behind video game music. I’m glad to see there are others.
This is the first post I stumbled across, but I thought I’d mention (somewhat related) that part of the ‘Good Egg Galaxy’ theme shares the same harmonic progression as ‘Hyrule Field’ from The Ocarina of Time (I apologize if you’ve already pointed that out in another post).
http://www.stwing.org/~rafi/blogfiles/galaxy_goodegg.mp3
http://www.stwing.org/~rafi/blogfiles/ocarina_hyrule.mp3
I look forward to reading (and commenting) on your posts.
by Rafi on February 1, 2009 at 10:21 pm #
Upon closer inspection, I realized I was a bit hasty to call them the “same harmonic progression”.
Functionally, both snippets follow the same pattern (with four coinciding chords), but there are some slight chordal differences, which I was curious enough to analyze:
http://raficus.blogspot.com/2009/02/hyrule-field-vs-good-egg-galaxy-follow.html
by Rafi on February 9, 2009 at 1:55 pm #
Hi. Great article btw. But im confused about one thing. You keep calling them the flat VI and flat VII, but the chords you’ve written out seem, to me, to be the natural VI and VII seven chords to those relative minor keys. Am i missing something? Thanks.
by b rad on May 16, 2009 at 10:56 am #
Hey b rad,
You’re right that the VI and VII chords I’m talking about are diatonic to minor keys, as in “Minuet” and “Serenade.” I only called them bVI and bVII throughout for consistency; I wanted to emphasize the similarity with the same progression in the major pieces like the SMB theme and “Gusty Garden.” Hopefully that wasn’t too confusing!
by Dan Bruno on May 16, 2009 at 11:26 am #
In my experience with common practice theory, a chord based on the seventh degree without an explicit flat sign assumes the leading tone and functions as a (diminished) dominant. A major chord built on a subtonic bVII (occurring in natural minor) usually functions modally rather than harmonically, unless it’s a secondary dominant of bIII (suggesting a shift to the relative mode). Even though the subtonic triad occurs diatonically in the natural minor, the raised seventh is usually used in progressions, which gives us the harmonic minor scale.
Like Dan said, the labels bVI and bVII keep consistency, but with the use of predominance of major chords, the progression seems to reside more in the major mode, making the labeled flats seem even more appropriate.
by Rafi on May 16, 2009 at 10:51 pm #
Actually, Gusty Garden Galaxy was composed by Koji Kondo, so it makes sense. The soundtrack states which tracks were composed by each composer. It’s funny that you happened to find that cadence in SMG as well, and on one of the reletively few tracks Koji composed for the game.
by Caleb on May 28, 2009 at 3:46 pm #
Hey, I found your blog via SU, and I’ve always been very interested in video game music, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.
I could talk forever on the bVI – bVII – i progression, and I somehow completely missed just how often Kondo used it his variation of it. In hindsight, it also makes up a considerable portion of the Dire, Dire Docks theme from Mario 64, as well.
I’ve noticed, in other games, that there is a lot of VI – VII – Isus – I, with the tonic triad originally being minor, but having a Picardy 3rd thrown in after the suspension to serve as the end to a section, i.e.
- The Musashi Legend, Brave Fencer Musashi
- Battle Theme, Golden Sun
The title theme from a very little-known NES game called Magic of Scheherazade has (what I think is) an interesting variation of this progression, as well. It has a bIII – IV – Vsus4 – V – I.
A lot of video game scores – not just by Kondo – use VI – VII – i in the minor mode, and I’d love to see you do a post on that. Some examples:
- I Am Impact! from Legend of the Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon
- Mountain Theme, Angry Sea Theme from Crystalis
- Battle Theme, Last Castle, Lava Dome from Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest
- Elf Field from Lagoon
- Frog’s Theme from Chrono Trigger
- War Demon from Wild ARMs
- Twinpeak Mountain from Brave Fencer Musashi (which also has an awesome octatonic opening)
- Battle with Gilgamesh from FFV (and I’m sure many other Uematsu pieces, this is just the first that comes to mind)
- Dr. Wily’s Castle from Megaman 2
- Guile’s Theme from Street Fighter 2
- Level 1 Theme from Journey to Silius
I’ve been arranging video game music for a little ensemble I lead, and the VI – VII – i progression is one that seems to pop up all over the place. I totally never made the connection with Kondo, though.
by ninj4 guy d4n on June 1, 2009 at 3:41 am #
While bVI-bVII-I is fairly uncommon in major, it’s fairly commonly used in minor pieces of music, as in VI-VII-i. (In natural minor, it’s virtually indispensable.) In either case, I find it a much more interesting ending to a piece than the usual V-I, which, for much of history, was the ending to 90% of all music!
by mouseonthemoon on February 1, 2010 at 7:02 pm #
I just wanted to say that I just discovered this blog, it is absolutely fantastic that I know have some resource to talk to people about the substance and theory behind video game music. I have been doing it for years and no one understands what the heck I’m saying. BRAVO and I look forward to posting frequently. THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE OUT THERE LIKE ME :D
by Mike on February 18, 2010 at 11:34 pm #
Thanks so much for the blog, Dan.
I found another one: the exquisite Lost Woods theme from Link to the Past.
by Telos on March 19, 2010 at 2:15 am #
I Zelda Ocarina of TIme is an awesome game. I think music theory behind it is fascinating. I hope to see a blog on Zelda Twlight Princess music.
by Daniel on August 1, 2010 at 4:41 am #