I enjoyed this post even more than the last. Now that you’re in the Zelda/Kondo groove, I look forward to seeing where you go next in your series.

I’m wondering how you feel about the whole MIDI versus recorded orchestrated music question. It’s a no-brainer to me, but I was surprised to receive a couple of responses on my blog recently in defense of the MIDI approach to music in the Zelda series and the hope that it wouldn’t change. Is this just preciousness about the old games, or is there really something preferable about triggered music samples?

“Post hoc ergo propter hoc”

From Wikipedia:

“Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”, is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) which states, “Since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one.”"

I look forward to these promised posts. =)

I can’t say I get a call and response sense from the pieces I’ve done so far. I would even go so far as to say that none of the pieces Link learns as a child — “Zelda’s Lullaby,” “Saria’s Song,” “Song of Time,” and the pieces mentioned in the post — are call and response; I have a hard time hearing, say, “Song of Storms” as two distinct phrases. I think the division between the trigger motive and answer motive is motivated by Kondo’s desire to use a larger set of pitches more than by any structural considerations.

However, the “warp” songs you learn as an adult — “Prelude of Light,” “Minuet of Forest,” and so on — most certainly are call and response; they literally feature an ocarina “call” from Link and a harp “response” from Sheik. I’ll probably give over an entire post to those pieces, because there are a few music theory gems in there.

I haven’t found anything from Kondo about his compositional process, but there is at least one piece that he had entirely pre-composed — “Zelda’s Lullaby,” which was already extant as a theme in A Link to the Past years before Ocarina of Time came out. I have a theory about that one too; I’m sure I’ve said this about a million times now, but I’ll be talking about it in a later post. ;)

As for the ontology discussion, I don’t know what I can say except that this is all just idle speculation on my part, so there might be no “proof” to find. Then again, a lot of music theory is ex post facto analysis of what a composer’s intention might have been, so I’m okay with that. :) Naturally, I’d need to have something more concrete than if I wanted to get this published somewhere, but I’m happy enough with the discussion it’s provoking right here. Thanks again for joining in!