Comments on: Koji Kondo’s favorite cadence

By: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:27:47 +0000

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: Grady Haynes

Grady Haynes — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 03:04:58 +0000

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: Hidarinoji

Hidarinoji — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:09:02 +0000

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: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:14:28 +0000

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: M. Nestor

M. Nestor — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:13:14 +0000

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: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:32:51 +0000

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: David Or

David Or — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:35:35 +0000

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: Ben Abraham

Ben Abraham — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:44:19 +0000

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

Ben Abraham — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:06:48 +0000

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: Michael Abbott

Michael Abbott — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:25:37 +0000

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.