Koji Kondo’s favorite cadence
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”:
“Serenade of Water”:
“Nocturne of Shadow”:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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’!
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. ;)
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!
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! :)
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. ^_^
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. :)
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.
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.
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!