Cruise Elroy

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five]

Koji Kondo on his experience writing the music for Ocarina of Time:

I had to create all of those memorable tunes with only five tones of the classic do-re-mi scale. Specifically: re, fa, la, and ti (and the higher-scale re). Since each of those songs, like Zelda’s Lullaby or Epona’s Song, had a particular theme, it was quite challenging, but I think it all felt really natural in the end. Then as soon as I was finished with those Ocarina songs, I had to create even more for Majora’s Mask—I got a lot of milage out of just five tones!

A lot of milage indeed. In this series of posts, I’m going to try to see what he’s up to. If you’re up for a little musical excursion, read on.

There are twelve songs you learn in Ocarina of Time (not counting the improvisatory “Scarecrow’s Song”), and all of them are ostensibly based on the pitches D, F, A, and B, and D an octave above.¹

Why ostensibly? Because although Kondo laments the four-pitch limitation, he has more freedom than it might initially seem because of how the game works.

To have Link perform a song, you take out your ocarina and play the beginning of the melody — a motive five to eight notes long, depending on the piece — using the controller. Playing this section, which I’ll call the trigger motive, causes the game to complete the rest of the tune automatically with what I’ll call the answer motive.

The upshot is that Kondo is only limited to four notes for the beginnings of the ocarina pieces. This is a significant distinction.

Take a look at “Sun’s Song,” transcribed below. I’ve put a double bar line between the trigger and answer motives.

As you can see, the trigger motive is constrained by the four-note palette, but the quick run in the second part has other pitches. After the player triggers the melody, the limit is removed, and Kondo has more compositional flexibility.

Why am I making a big deal about this? Well, “Sun’s Song” is an edge case; it’s the only piece you learn to play that never gets harmonized. Every other song is either filled out with orchestration when you trigger it, or is heard elsewhere in the game as part of the background music.

In other words, these melodies are not only written to be ocarina solos — there are harmonic considerations too. I’d like to suggest that that the the tonal restriction Kondo talks about influences how the pieces are written.

Let’s look at “Song of Storms.” Here’s a transcription of the piece as Link plays it, with a double bar line as before:

Even without any orchestration there’s not much harmonic wiggle room here. Kondo uses the octave Ds to firmly establish the tonic, and the flatted third (F) in the trigger motive sets up the unambiguously minor answer motive.

Here’s the Kakariko Village Windmill background music, which features the “Song of Storms” melody:

The harmony indicates that we’re in the Dorian mode, which is the mode most strongly suggested by the available pitches; there’s a complete minor triad (D, F, A) and the characteristic raised sixth (B♮). In layman’s terms, Kondo has found the easiest mode to compose in with these notes and exploited it. “Song of Storms,” then, is one of the most basic ocarina pieces; Kondo has allowed the pitches to dictate the trigger melody, and the consequent phrase in the Kakariko Village Windmill theme doesn’t break any new ground.

Everything can’t be as simple as the Dorian mode, though, and things get more interesting when Kondo breaks out into other harmonic areas. Let’s look at “Epona’s Song.” Here’s the solo ocarina version:

Out of context, this is a harmonically vague phrase. The tonic is most likely D, but not necessarily; even so, it’s impossible to pin down a key using only scale degrees one, five, and six. Without the third, we can’t even definitively say if it’s major or minor.

More importantly, note how Kondo continues to use the same pitches in the answer motive, even though other options are available. In other words, the piece is composed — intentionally, perhaps — so that you can’t discern the key from the ocarina solo alone.

Now let’s turn to the Lon Lon Ranch background music, which uses the “Epona’s Song” melody:

The harmony reveals that the tune is in D major, but as we saw above, we couldn’t determine that from the first four bars of the melody. My theory is that this delay is intentional.

Because there’s no obvious key to the “ocarina solo” portion of the song, the harmonic content of the first phrase unfolds relatively slowly. (Indeed, if we were to look at the melody alone, the key doesn’t become completely obvious until the eighth bar.) This protracted development creates a richer, more nuanced melody than “Song of Storms,” which repeats a single phrase ad nauseam. That melody, in turn, provides a basis for the modulation into F major and its new musical idea.

And thus Kondo’s stated difficulty with the limited pitch material ended up helping him out. Restriction breeds creativity.

I hope you all could make some sense of this. I’ll have a few more posts about music from Ocarina of Time over the next couple of weeks; in the meantime, I look forward to your responses.

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five]

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1. Looking at those solfège syllables, it seems like Kondo’s a fixed do kind of guy.

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.

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1. 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”).
2. 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).
3. You can read the full story, including Kondo’s quote, in the interview Yokota and Kondo did with Nintendo president Saturo Iwata.