Triple Click - The Music of The Legend of Zelda [Strong Songs]

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Few video game series have a musical tradition as rich as The Legend of Zelda.This bonus cross-post from Kirk's music podcast Strong Songs takes a deep dive into the musical legacy of Nintendo's legendary adventure series. From Zelda's Lullabye to Epona's Song to the Great Fairy Fountain and Dragon Roost Island, Kirk unravels some of his favorite Zelda music and explores how Nintendo's composers keep weaving them back together into beautiful new patterns.Written by: Main themes by Koji Kondo, with additional compositions by Kenta Nagata (Wind Waker), Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai (Breath of the Wild)Featuring music from: The Legend of Zelda (1986), A Link to the Past (1991), Ocarina of Time (1998), Wind Waker (2002), Skyward Sword (2011), A Link Between Worlds (2013), and Breath of the Wild (2017)ALSO FEATURED/DISCUSSED:Themes from Star Wars, Superman, and Jurassic Park by John WilliamsThe Super Mario Bros. theme by Koji Kondo, and the episode of Strong Songs discussing itKirk's weekly video game podcast Triple Click, which he makes along with Jason Schreier and Maddy MyersOUTRO SOLOIST: Charles McNealCharles McNeal is a killin' Oakland-based sax player who plays all over the bay area. He's also a master jazz transcriber, and has chronicled tons of great solos. You can find him playing out in a variety of bands and settings; the best way to keep up with his music is to subscribe to his YouTube channel or follow him on Instagram @charlesonsax2.SUPPORT STRONG SONGSPaypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIA@StrongSongs | @Kirkhamilton | IG: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERhttps://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music. Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Hello, wonderful Triple Click listeners. Kirk here with a special little bonus for all of you. As many of you know, probably all of you probably know. In addition to Triple Click, I make a music podcast called Strong Songs that I've been making for three years in change now. I'm in my fourth year making the show, which is kind of wild to think about. And I talk about all kinds of music on that show, funk, jazz, soul, lots of rock music, lots of pop music. I recently did my first heavy metal track talking about a tune by Mastodon. I cover all kinds of music, but sometimes I also talk about video game music. A couple of years ago, I did an episode on the World One One theme from Super Mario Brothers,

which was pretty fun. And around that same time, I actually did a special episode of Triple Click about the music of Final Fantasy 7. But those are really the only two podcast episodes that I've done dedicated to video game music. Until now, this past week, I finally made a Strong Songs episode that I've been planning for a long time all about the music of the Legend of Zelda series. It was super fun to make. I'm really proud of it, and I realized, after making it, you know what? I bet that there are some triple-click listeners out there who would enjoy this.

So that's what you're about to hear. I just took the whole episode, and I'm dropping it into your feet as a little bonus here at the start of the week. It's just an explanation of a bunch of my favorite Zelda music and how it all kind of fits together. I get into a little bit of music theory, but nothing too wild. If you don't play any instruments, I think you'll still probably get something out of it. And really, I mean, it's just an excuse to talk about a bunch of really great music. So if you're already a Strong Songs listener and you already listen to this episode, there's nothing new in the episode you're about to hear. You can safely just skip it.

But if you didn't hear it, and that sounds like it might be cool to you, I hope you dig it. And hey, if you like it, go check out Strong Songs. It's a fun show. I have a great time with it. And I've covered so much music at this point. You can just look through the backlog and you'll probably find something that you're interested in. So with that, take it away, past Kirk, and tell us all about the music of The Legend of Zelda. And I hope that you all enjoy this episode of Strong Songs.

When you hear the word flute, you probably picture a silver instrument about yay big, looks a certain way, and makes a very specific sort of sound. But the flute family is so much bigger than that, with other types of transverse flutes, end balloon flutes, pipes, whistles, acarinas, and more. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and as always, I'm so glad that you have joined me to talk about music played on every type of flute from Piccolo to Pan Pipes to Penny Whistle and beyond. Strong Songs is a totally listener-supported show, which means none of you have to listen to ads. You just have to hear me at the start of every episode, asking you if you'd like to become a patron of strong songs,

and if you would, you can even get bonus episodes of this show. So go to patreon.com slash strong songs to find out more. On this episode, oh man, can you feel it? Can you feel the excitement in the air? I can because I know that we're going to be talking about some of the greatest video game music ever composed. Man, I'm excited to get into it. So let's grab our master's sword and solve some puzzles, yeah?

Video games, video games, video games. They are a fascinating art form with a uniquely interactive relationship with their audience, and they're also uniquely musical in a way that I have always found fascinating. Many of you will know that I spent most of the 2010s writing about video games. I've spent quite a lot of my time thinking about them, talking about them, writing about them, doing podcasts about them, and of course playing them, and something that I always come back to whenever,

I think about video games is music. There is just something fundamentally musical about video games, and part of that is the fact that they are an interactive medium, and as a result, you spend a lot of time pressing buttons, and in fact you press buttons in time. I've always made the argument that playing a video game is not totally dissimilar from playing a musical instrument. In fact, there are almost as many buttons on a modern Xbox video game controller as there are keys on a saxophone. But that's not the only reason that video game music makes such a strong impression on people. People just love video game music, and I'm counting myself among them. There are so many video game soundtracks that have left such an impression on me,

and I think some of it is just that some of the greatest composers of the last 50 years happened to write music for video games. Many of the formative video games of the first couple of decades of the medium's existence didn't have any dialogue, so they relied heavily on music for the emotional impact the game and also a lot of these game series have stayed true to the original compositions that drove the very first entries in those series all those years ago and as a result we've been listening to so many of the same themes for so many years that they've just become kind of a part of our lives and that's why today there are millions of people across several

different generations that when they hear this or this or this or this they're immediately hit with a flood of memories, a slow, gentle wash of nostalgia that begins to bring another piece of music up, from the deep recesses of their minds ear up and up to the front until eventually the music takes over and they're ready to set out on another grand adventure. On this episode, we are going to be talking about one of the most musically important and musically coherent video game series of all time, Nintendo's long-running adventure saga, The Legend of Zelda. For more than 30 years, composer Koji Kondo's music has been the beating heart of this beloved series,

shifting and changing as new composers, instrumentalists, and arrangers breathe new life into his endlessly appealing musical themes. One of the most fascinating things about Zelda music is how much it's changed over the years, while not actually changing that much at all. And in fact, in that way, it's not that dissimilar from Nintendo games in general. In the 36 years since the world first heard this iconic heroic anthem, There have been so many new Zelda games with so many new musical ideas, even while the series' musical identity has remained remarkably consistent. And it's that musical identity that I want to get at on this episode,

as I analyze the composition and evolution of a number of my favorite pieces of Zelda music from the distant and not-so-distant past. To this day, I still remember when I first heard the theme music from The Legend of Zelda. I was probably nine, eight or nine years old. My neighbor, Kelly, had just gotten a Nintendo entertainment system. This was in the late 1980s, and he had me over to play a game called The Legend of Zelda. I was immediately taken with it. I was already very excited about video games like most kids my age were, and I heard this music,

and it stuck out to me. I remember even at the time just thinking, this feels real to me in a way that video games haven't up until now. This isn't just a cool little thing with bleeps and bloops moving around on the screen. This feels like an adventure. This is something tangible that I can kind of invest my imagination in, and it was all down to that musical theme. Even on the original Nintendo's relatively simple sound module, it was clear they were on to something.

Now, we're going to be talking about a lot of Zelda music on this episode, probably more than I can even fit in. We'll see if I can actually get in everything that I have in my outline here, because, as I said, there's so much great music in so many Zelda games over the decades. But that original theme, composed by Koji Kondo and released in 1986, as the title track for The Legend of Zelda, which is one of the flagship games

for the new Nintendo Entertainment System, that piece of music is really kind of the Rosetta Stone, the thing that decodes the entire musical identity of the Legend of Zelda. Some of that is for technical, harmonic reasons, sure, but most of it is just emotional. For me and for so many other people, it's just the theme song for adventure,

for mystery, for a grand, open world, beckoning you forward and begging you to come and explore it. It's not a mistake that in so many Zelda games, this is the first piece of music that you hear. It's both a welcome and a promise. Welcome to this world. You're a part of it, and there's so much for you to discover. So let's start with that theme. It seems like a good place to start. And I want to talk about what makes it good just as a melody, as a piece of music, and also how it changed, how it evolved over the years, because it's been in a lot of Zelda games, it always kind of turns up one way or another.

So the Legend of Zelda theme is in the key of B-flat, and it usually is in the key of B-flat whenever it turns up. Let's start with this melody, just the very first melody that you hear. I want you to think of it like a line. So listen to how it goes down and then it goes up. Try to just follow the line of the melody. So it's a really well put together a melody and it does something interesting right off the bat. It goes down, which is actually kind of uncommon for a heroic theme. We're in the key of b flat. The first two notes are a b flat and an f. That's the root and the fifth. Very common first two notes for heroic anthem, but it's a little less common to go from the root down to the fifth below the root rather than going up to the fifth above the root. Going down sounds like

this. Going up sounds like this. Now typically a heroic theme is going to kind of have some sort of upward, forward propulsion, right? You want to feel like you're setting out on an adventure. You're a hero, you're moving forward, you're answering the call to adventure, and a melody that moves upward kind of lines up with that emotional arc. A lot of the most famous heroic themes actually begin with a fifth, which is a nice open interval. You just jump up a fifth.

It's a big and exciting interval and a very classic sound. For example, or... Master of the heroic theme, John Williams, was a big fan of the fifth. Those two examples, the theme from Star Wars and the theme from Superman,

both begin with a very prominent, upward fifth at the start to kick things off. And actually, another one of Williams' most famous themes begins with not one but two ascending fifths placed right after one another. As Jurassic Park demonstrated, why have one ascending fifth when you can have a second ascending fifth that's even higher than the first one? So the Zelda theme very much does have an upward trajectory. It feels like that same sense of climbing and, you know, increased excitement as the line moves

upward, but first it moves down. And I've always really liked that about it. It feels a little bit like it's getting set before a big jump. It's not just leaping out of the door. It's kind of bending its legs and getting ready, and then it sets out and upward. Now, the harmony supporting this melody is also pretty cool, so we're in the key at B-flat, and we start on a B-flad major chord. After dropping down to that fifth, the melody just walks up the first five notes of a B-flad major scale, a really clear upward trajectory in the melody, but the harmony, the bass note actually drops down a whole step for that second chord.

It goes to, I guess, an F minor over A-flad. You could also call this an A-flad major, and it's down a whole note. step even though the melody is moving up. So we've got some nice contrary motion right off the bat where the melody is clearly climbing upward while the harmony is moving downward Now here's where things get exciting. So the melody is sitting on this F we're still very squarely in the key of B flat major, but then the whole thing actually changes keys for a couple of bars. So it shifts up to a G flat major and it's really nice how it does it. It's kind of walking up this B flat major scale really clearly and then all at once it just shifts into G flat major starting on that F and it's really nice how it does it. It's kind of walking up this B flat major starting on that F. which is a very distinctive sound and gives you a sense that the melody has entered a new place. Incidentally, that scale is a specific type of scale. It's like a B-flat major scale with a flat-7 and a flat-sixth, otherwise known as Mixalidian Flat Sixth, or the fifth mode of the melodic minor scale. Now this isn't like a modal melody or anything, this melody is shifting along with a chord progression that's shifting with it and it's staying within the key,

but it is a kind of distinctive sounding scale and the first time I heard it, I was like, wait a minute, I know that sound. Ah, it's melodic mind. of course, it kind of turns up in the most unexpected places. Meanwhile, the harmony is actually still moving down. So we've gone from a B flat to an A flat and now to a G flat, so it's gone down in whole steps, even while the melody has gone on an entire octave, it's gone from a B flat up to a B flat, but because the harmony has changed so much, that second B flat up the octave, it's a really different sound. That's the third in the key of G flat.

So it's a wonderful transformation that this melody undergoes as it climbs what amounts to a scale's worth of notes, but it just shifts halfway through from one kind of scale to another kind of scale and actually changes keys in the process. That key change actually completes right here with a resolution to D-flat. So now we're kind of in this D-flat key center. So this is the midpoint of the phrase,

and in that first half, we've gone from B-flat up to D-flat. We've kind of changed keys. The second half of the phrase busies itself with changing the key back to B-flat so that the melody can repeat. The way that Kondo does that is this really nice descending sequence of basically three notes. B-ba-da-dum, starts in the key of B with a nice sharp four in there, nice little Lydian sound, then down to B-flad minor, then a surprising turn to C major, which leads to F, which leads back to B-flat. Now there's so much nice directional stuff going on in there. I'm not going to

get too into any specific thing just because I've got a lot of music I want to get through, but this chord progression is super cool. If you are listening to this episode, if you play piano or guitar, some chord instrument, if you can sit down and learn this chord progression, I think it'll give you a new appreciation for the Zelda melody because it really shows how this progression moves in a slightly different way from the melody that's constantly setting up the melody and emphasizing this sort of narrative arc that it goes through as it climbs up, contrasted against the harmony moving down, then changes keys, then goes through this lovely sequence as it kind of staircases its weighed down with a surprise little move up in the harmony to that C, to the F, and then back

to B flat, because before you know it, you've gone all the way back around to the beginning, and you're starting the journey again. It's really economical writing. It fits a whole lot of stuff into a little bit of time and tells a whole little story just in the space of about eight bars. This is the version from 1991's The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, which I'll always think of as the kind of quintessential version of this theme. And a lot of the reason for that is you can just tell that Kondo was freed up to play around more with the orchestration just because the sound module and the Super Nintendo in 1991 had a lot more options for polyphony compared with the Nintendo Entertainment System.

So I talked a lot about the sound module in the original NES in last year's episode about the theme from Super Mario Brothers. So if you want to learn more about that, go listen to that episode. But I'm just going to move on from the original NES. And actually pretty soon, we're going to move on from the Super Nintendo as well. But I do really like how so many of those. ideas that were present in the original version, in particular the counter melody that runs as a sort of an echo to the main melody?

That only grows more prominent over time, and the version in a link to the past really emphasizes that counter melody. You can hear it over on the left running throughout the entire thing. Do you hear it? It's over there on the left. Now while this theme does usually turn up in some form or other in every Zelda game, it's not actually the main theme for every Zelda game, and in fact a whole lot of them at this point don't feature this theme music as the primary sort of open world field music or the introductory credits

crawl music. You'll hear elements of it. You'll hear sort of an echo here or there. But most of the time you won't hear the full theme, which makes the moments when it does play feel really special. I will always love the 2013 game, A Link Between Worlds, which is a sort of spiritual successor to that 1991 Zelda game, a link to the past. I really, really like Link Between Worlds.

It's actually one of my favorite Zelda games. And part of the reason for that is because it's taking so many aspects of a link to the past and sort of remixing them and reimagining them. And that means that we get to hear some really fleshed out and wonderfully performed versions of some of my favorite pieces of Zelda music, including the main Zelda theme. And I mean, as great as this sounded on the classic sound modules of those old consoles, it's still pretty cool to hear it played by live musicians. So like I said, that theme music doesn't always turn up as the title music for a given Zelda game,

But you can always hear elements of it. One of my favorites is actually in 1998's Ocarina of Time, probably pound for pound the most influential and memorable of all of the Zelda soundtracks, partly because it was a game about a magical ocarina, a magical flute that Link would play and that would allow him to change the weather, or call his horse, or even travel through time. Now, the theme from Ocarina of Time, with the music that plays when you first venture out into the open world,

it's a very different theme, and yet, After that analysis that we did of the melody for the original legend of Zelda theme, I wonder if you hear some similarities with the version that Koji Kondo wrote for Aquino of Time. You can hear the similarity, right? It begins with that fifth. We're in the key of G here, but it begins with the G dropping down to the fifth, and you halfway expect it to go straight into the Zelda theme, but of course it doesn't.

It goes in a different direction. And this whole theme, the whole Aquarina of Time, Hyrule Field music, really just constantly feels like this mirror version of the Zelda theme. You're always kind of hearing it, but never quite hearing it in full. There are these snippets of the melody that come in, but it never quite resolves where you're expecting. It always goes to a different kind of a corridor, leads to a different kind of a section. It's a really engaging experience listening to it because first you recognize something and then you realize it's different. It's like, uh, oh. So Aco Arena really established

the idea that the Zelda series takes existing music from previous games and, echoes it and recycles it and reworks it flips it upside down, puts it through a mirror, and shows it to you in a new light. It's a really cool thing because the more you play these games and the more familiar you are with them, the more the soundtracks begin to resonate with you and you start to hear all of those subtle little callbacks, those subtle little ways that Kondo and other subsequent composers will weave those existing themes into the score for a new game, and that creates the sense of a sort of loose, undefined musical identity.

It's not so specific as, you know, movements in a symphony. It's more that there are just these themes that always seem to turn up one way or another, and the ways that they turn up in a given game can tell you something about the way that that game is interpreting or reinterpreting the same themes of exploration and heroism that come back again and again and again throughout the Zalda series. And no matter how much the music may seem to have changed, like it really seemed to have changed, with 2017's Breath of the Wild, actually that musical identity is always there.

And the more you play, the more it'll make itself known to you, like distant calls from a long-lost friend. Breath of the Wild was a remarkable musical departure in so many ways, and yet, the more I played that game and then, the more I listened to that soundtrack, the more I came to appreciate all of the ways that that score incorporates Kondo's original themes

and some of those really beautiful themes from Akarina of Time in particular. But staying on that main Zelda theme for right now, I absolutely love what Breath of the Wild does with the main Zelda theme. It's not really present, it doesn't play at any point really in the game. So you could play for 10, 20 hours without hearing it, and then one night, riding on your horse as the moon rises above the misty treetops. This beautiful light piano part plinking back and forth left and right in your ears. And then, out of the mist, so quiet.

that at first you're not even sure what you're hearing. The first time that solo cello floated out of the night to play the original Zelda theme for me in Breath of the Wild, I mean, it was one of the most magical moments I've ever had in a video game, and the reason for that is because this theme has been connected to me for so many years when I was playing that game. It had been 30 years since I first heard it. Hearing it as I watched the hero on screen ride through the ruins of a kingdom, like a lone An echo of a lost era, a hero from another time with just the faintest wisp of a hope that

he can return to finish an ancient fight. The game was spectacularly cashing in on a musical relationship that it had built with me over decades. There are so many examples of that kind of echoing, that sort of subtle, compositional, and arranging work that I couldn't possibly list them all. There are a few, though, that I really love that I wanted to highlight. So a minute ago when I was talking about Ocarina of Time, I played a bit of a little bit of a piece called Ipona's song, which is the piece that Link plays on his

ocarina when he wants to summon his horse, his trusty steed Epona. Ipona's theme plays at Lonlan Ranch, which is where Link first finds Ipona. And anyone who's played this game or is kind of familiar with Zelda probably knows that motif, that melody, because you played it so many times in Ocarina of Time to summon your horse. So when playing Breath of the Wild all these years later, the first time that you go to the stables, which is where you get your horse, always an important moment in a Zelda game when you get your horse,

you turn up at the stables and the music just sounds like its own thing. There's this nice sort of hand drumming bongo part, this nice acoustic guitar. Doesn't sound particularly familiar. This beautiful recorder part comes in playing what sounds like a new melody, but then, just long enough for you to notice it, like a little edit in The Matrix, there's just a couple of notes of of Apona's theme to suggest that yes, this is the horse place, yes, this is where you're going to get your trusty steed, and they work in the first three notes of Apona's theme, which are pretty distinctive when played in this way. It's even in the same key as Aquina of Time, it's in the key of D major, which really just creates

that subtle sonic link. So the first time that I went to the stables and I heard this, I thought, oh, that's nice. Nice little reference to Apona's theme. But here's the thing. So in Breath of the Wild, there's this wonderful character named Kass. He's this nice bird man, and he roves around the kingdom. The thing about Koss is, he plays the accordion. So you actually usually hear him before you see him, because he's always standing somewhere

playing the accordion. Sometimes he's standing in the middle of a dense jungle, sometimes on planes in front of an abandoned ruin. And sometimes you'll find him at a stable, playing along with the stable music, adding his own very familiar melody. as it turns out, the Breath of the Wild Stable music is written with a hole in it, a hole that perfectly fits an accordion rendition of Epona's theme. So a lot of Zelda games do like to do that subtle re-packaging, that slight reworking

where you hear an echo and you're not totally sure what you heard, but they're not always subtle like that. Sometimes the joy of playing a new Zelda game is just getting to hear one of those classic pieces of music reimagined, maybe with different instrumentation, a different arrangement, or different musicians performing it. And that's certainly true of the more involved piece. of music like the ones that I've talked about so far. But a cool thing about Zelda is that in addition to those kinds of compositions,

there are also these smaller ones. Down at the smallest end of the spectrum, there are these little stingers that play when you accomplish certain tasks, like maybe you get an important item. Or maybe you open a really big, really exciting chest with an important item inside. Or maybe you figure out how to open up a secret door. Those little flourishes tend to turn up again and again and again, and again in Zelda games, it's always fun to keep an ear out for them, to hear how maybe they're

changed from game to game or reinterpreted. Those examples that I just played are all from Macarena of Time. And both that chest opening music and also the Secret Solve music, they both actually lean into really distinct tonal colors to sort of paint the picture that they're painting. Actually, both of them rely on a sort of whole tone or augmented sound, though they sound very different and they kind of do it in different ways. So that chest opening sound, that's That's a series of four notes. It's actually just four whole steps. So it's almost a major scale, but then it has a sharp four.

So it's these four notes. And then it just moves up chromatically, so it does the same four notes up a half step. It starts in A, then it goes to B flat, then to B, then to C, then to C sharp, then to D. It ends on that really jangly A-flat dominant seventh chord, which is not a super resolved sounding chord and that's actually something I really like about it. It's this big build, very uncomfortable and very full of anticipation and it doesn't really resolve at this super happy, settled sounding chord. It's actually kind of a funky place to end. It kind of makes sense when you think about it though because it feels a little bit like it's about to step forward. It's sort of moving

somewhere and you're not sure where. It doesn't sound really resolved. But that kind of makes sense because usually when it plays, you've just opened a chest and gotten some exciting new tool that you're going to get to use on your adventure going forward. So it's got this real forward momentum to it that fits with the emotional tenor of the moment that it's underscoring. And that brings us to the Secret Unlocked Sound, which is one of the greatest

video game musical sings of all times, certainly one of the most iconic, and I really like it. I think one of the reasons that it sticks with people is because it's a little bit harmonically unusual, it really leans into that augmented sound, and it has this kind of very bright sound as a result.

So when I'm talking about whole tone and augmented, just to kind of explain those two terms, I know I've talked about them before, but a whole tone scale is a scale that's made completely out of whole steps. It has a very distinctive sound, it's a totally symmetrical scale, and there are actually only two of them, because once you get past two, you just start repeating the same scale. So a whole tone scale and an augmented chord have one big thing in common, and that is a sharp five. So an augmented chord is like a major chord, say a major triad, but the fifth has been raised.

So it has a sharp five or an augmented. fifth, that's why it's called an augmented chord. It's a very bright sound. It's one of the brightest triads that you can have. And again, it has that sort of unsettled, leaning forward kind of a feeling that works really well with this little flourish that just shows you, oh, somewhere in the dungeon you're in, a secret door is opened. So if I play this on piano, just nice and kind of slowly, it starts pretty chromatically,

actually. It's kind of doing a diminished thing, if anything, on the way down. But it lands on a G sharp down at the bottom, and then it goes. goes up to an E, which is a sharp 5 away from G sharp, and then a G sharp and then a C. And that's if you're in root position, that's a G sharp augmented chord, which again, it just has a kind of an unresolved feeling, feels kind of like a five chord that's leading somewhere, but definitely hasn't resolved. I mean, the augmented chord is a very old-fashioned and very classic way of ending a cadence,

which is setting up a resolution like so, which sets up. Only in this case, the whole thing happens a lot faster, and the resolution never arrives. This is one that's also evolved over the years, and I really like the version that they included in Breath of the Wild, which featured quite a bit of acoustic piano, and this one was just played on a piano. Really goes to show the power of the whole tone scale and of that sharp five. It gives it a really distinct sound that I think gives this tiny little jingle a really

strong sonic identity, and that's one of the reasons that it's still memorable all these years after we first heard it. Which brings me to another very famous. famous Zelda melody that also uses some unusual harmonic and melodic tricks to get this very strong musical identity. It's another one that's been reinterpreted and reimagined in pretty much every Zelda game ever made. That is, of course, the Great Fairies Fountain. So usually when Link discovers the Great Ferry's Fountain, it's in some cave, it's somewhere you weren't necessarily expecting to find it. And the Great Fairy is always there, usually with a line or two of dialogues,

some way of powering you up, but there are also these little fairies around her. And they tend to just float in the air in circles. They move in little spirals. And to me, that's always felt like a visual representation of what the music is doing. It's this endless spiral that sort of floats down to the ground and then catches the wind and floats back up into the air. So we have yet another piece of music here that doesn't ever really resolve. And I should say that there is a reason for that.

And that's because most of these video game compositions need to loop because you don't actually know how long a player is going to be in one area. So when Link goes into the fairy fountain, he could just stay there for half an hour. And while Cochicondo could have composed music that arrives at an ending point and has a conclusion and then just starts up again, you'll certainly hear that in plenty of video games, he preferred to write these kinds of chord progressions where there's a loop point, kind of like a gif that loops over and over again. And if you really pay attention, you can hear where it is.

But the composition works as this seamless loop, and that also gives it this really nice suspended feeling that works beautifully for somewhere like this fountain where the energy is so serene and just kind of floating and never really ending or landing. So this is a very classic sounding kind of a chord progression. We're in the key of F major and there's a lot of sevenths happening and there's a lot of ninths in the melody. So we actually start on a B flat major seven, which is functioning sort of like a G minor nine,

but it's a B flat major seven. So we have a B flat in the bass and the melody starts up on that A, which is the major seven above B flat. And then the melody does this four-note motif that just repeats through this whole tune. You can hear it underneath me right now. While the harmony moves down to an F-major 7 over A, then it goes down again to a G-minor 7, then a C-7 over G, and then it resolves finally to an F-major 7. Now that's the middle of the phrase, and that's where the resolution takes place.

Common trick for Koji Kondo. So that first half of the phrase is just a nice steady walk down. We start on the B-flat, then down to F over A, G minor 7 down to F. Nice walk down. Now what's cool is the second half of the phrase, the left hand, you know, the sort of bass parts, move down in the same way,

but the right hand, the melody, moves up. So suddenly we have some contrary motion and they pull apart for this really beautiful, suspended part in the middle of the phrase. We start yet again on a B-flat major 7, only this time the second chord is an A diminished, which leads up to a D-7, which then goes to a G-minor 7,

to a C7 over G, and to an F. It's really close to the same chord progression that happens the first time, but those different chords and the fact that the melody moves up, it adds a whole new emotional energy to this part of the piece. It's really beautiful, and it's actually a more subtle difference than it sounds like when you listen. It's the difference between this and this. And that's what really sticks out to me about this piece.

It's a very simple repeating motif placed over this beautiful chord progression that follows really traditional rules, you know, of harmony. It's just moving around the cycle. 36, 251, 251. It's not really that far removed from a jazz standard like Satendahl, but because of the specificity with which Kondo approached it, he created this beautiful

vibe that's carried on for generations of Zelda games and always imparts that same serene, floating feeling. You've stumbled into a mysterious cave, ethereal light refracting through the shallow pools of water and just so lightly, never ceasing our

touching the ground, you hear the flutter of little wings. It's a beautiful piece of music, and I feel like I hear it referenced pretty often. One of my favorite uses of the great fairy fountain music is actually an Edgar Wright's adaptation of Scott Pilgrim versus the world. It starts on an ordinary day for young Scott Pilgrim. He's leaving the bathroom, and suddenly he finds himself magically transported to another dimension. It's just perfect. It was such a great choice by Edgar Wright to use this music. It's such dreamlike music. It really, really conveys this otherworldly feeling. And I think again, a lot of that comes down to the way that it never quite resolves.

It's just this beautiful cushiony pillow kind of floating you upward over and over and over again without ever setting you down. There's another great Zelda melody that makes use of the major seventh, and when I call it a Zelda melody, I'm not just referring to the series that it's from, I'm actually referring to the character that it accompanies. Ever since a link to the past, Zelda's melody has accompanied the character, her self, namesake for this series, and obviously one of the most important characters in it. This is another exceptionally lush Koji Kondo composition, and I just want to focus on that opening

melody, the main motif of Zelda's Lullaby, because I think it's really beautiful, and he's doing a cool little harmonic trick here. So we're in the key of G, and the main motif for Zelda's Lullaby is just these three notes. So that's B, D, and A, or 3, 5, 2. And while there is a one chord, a G major chord at one point in this phrase, it's in the middle of the phrase. So this one doesn't resolve, so again it just gives it that floating feeling. But what's really cool is what's going on in the harmony underneath the melody. So the melody starts on that B, which if we were on a G chord would be the third, but we're not on a G chord. It actually starts on a four chord, which is a C chord,

and it starts up on that B, which is the major seventh in the key of C. So the very first note is this nice lush major seven. Now you may hear that and think that sounds familiar and that's because Zelda's lullaby begins on the seventh scale degree of the four chord, which is the same place that the great fairy fountain theme begins. So instead of, we have... Now obviously those are two very different melodies and two very different chord progressions, but they're doing some similar things and he's using some similar melodic intervals to get the same kinds of suspended, beautiful, mysterious sounds.

While the fairy fountain theme is kind of gently spiraling down, Zelda's Lullaby is more sort of floating in place, and he achieves that with a cool harmonic trick. He uses a C pedal tone on the first four chords during this opening statement of the melody. He starts with that C major 7 chord with the C in the bass, and then he plays a D chord still with the C in the bass, so a D over C. Which means that the harmony, the chords are moving upward, but the bass is staying put, and that makes for a very nice juxtaposition. It's a really beautiful chord progression. I recommend stealing this one if you're ever writing any music. Just four major seven to five over four.

It creates this lovely suspended, very safe, very beautiful sound. So of course it's not just those two chords. They go through those two chords a couple of times. And then that D over C resolves down to a G over B, nice one chord, which then really quickly goes to a sort of B-flat diminished sound, to an A minor nine, to a D-7. And then as we sit on this five chord, rather than resolving to one, it just returns to that C major seven, to that four major seven, and begins the cycle again. So yet again, we have a piece of music that never actually resolves and ends.

It just loops over and over and over again. Now, this is where it gets a little crazy. So Zelda's Lullaby is an iconic piece of Zelda music. It turns up in a lot of Zelda games, and whenever I hear it, I usually think, oh, that's nice. It's Zelda's Lullaby. And then came 2013's The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword and its main heroic anthem, The Ballad of the Goddess. Does this sound familiar?

No? Well, it didn't sound familiar to me either. It just sounded like a nice little melody, but let's just look at it. Hmm, let's play through it on piano. Here are the first few notes of the Ballad of the Goddess. And here's the rest. So that's a nice melody, but what would happen, you know,

if I were to just play it backwards? Sometimes I like to just take things that I've learned on piano, and just randomly play them backwards, let's see what happens if I play those notes backwards. No. What? Yes, that is correct. The Ballad of the Goddess from Legend of Zelda's Skyward Sword is actually Zelda's lullaby played backwards. It's not something that I noticed, just off the top of my head the first time that I heard it,

and it's probably not even something I would have figured out if I had been learning this on the piano, but once you know to listen for it, you can kind of hear it. So the back half of the Ballad of the Goddess is the opening. phrase of Zelda's Lullaby, and just listen to it and see what you hear. So if you reverse it, the long, unresolved notes at the end, instead become introductory notes at the start of a phrase, and it sounds very different. It's so cool that they did this, that when I first learned that they did this, it just completely blew my head open, because I've been playing this game and just, it totally hadn't

occurred to me, that they would be pulling something like that. And I mean, that melody, it doesn't just turn up in this nice, delicate, solo harp version. It really is the main heroic theme for the whole game. And you get these triumphant versions of it with a full orchestra, and it's hiding this amazing secret in plain sight. It's one of my favorite video game music Easter eggs of all time. I've talked about it in the past, but I just had to share it with all of you because I figured there's some of you out there who probably don't know about it,

and it's just so cool. Actually, as it turns out, if you combine the first letter of each musical phrase in this piece of music, it spells out, Zelda will be playable in Breath of the Wild, Okay, it doesn't say that. But look, a guy can dream, right? This is the level the series is operating at. This is the degree of care that the composers are able to bring to each game. They've got all these great musical building blocks to work with, this cornucopia of iconic

melodies to pull from. They're given such free reign to work with all of these different elements so you never really know what you're going to hear. The next Zelda game, it may feature a reinterpretation of the simple yet beautiful song of storms. Or maybe we'll get a reprise of the drive. thriving flamenco of Garuda Valley. You can basically just go onto YouTube, look for Legend of Zelda soundtracks, and pick one at random,

and you'll probably hear something that's amazing, rich, and complex, and worthy of a deeper analysis. But while there are so many Zelda melodies that I could still talk about, I want to close this episode with a piece of Zelda music that's near and dear to my heart, one of my favorite pieces from one of my favorite Zelda games, and actually, a game that we haven't talked about on this episode yet. I'm talking, of course, about 2002's The Wind Waker, and the beloved, beautiful theme from Dragon Ruse Island. Now, Dragon Roo S Island, unlike most of the other music that I've talked about in this episode, was not composed by Koji Kondo.

It was composed by Kenton Nagata, or at least I believe that's the name of the composer. There were a few different people who worked on Wind Waker, but I'm pretty sure that he is the composer who wrote it. Nagata did a great job here, and he's really kind of channeling that same flamenco energy from the Garudo Valley theme that Kondo wrote for Akorina of Time several years before Windwaker came out. Now, Aquarina of Time came out on the Nintendo 64 in 1998. Windwaker came out four years later on the GameCube,

and the GameCube had much more capability when it came to sound. So we get a much more full-sounding recording, even though it's actually a very simple arrangement with really only four instruments. So we're in G minor here. This is a really nice chord progression. It goes from G minor down to F major, so this is another one that goes from 1 to flat 7. It's a nice chord progression overall,

but it's interesting how they're playing it. Over on the left, you've got this guitar. of course strumming through the chords in this very sprightly flamenco-inspired way, but there's no bass. And over on the right you'll hear there's a sort of a pan flute that's playing what amounts to a bass line, just one five one in octaves through the chord progression. Melody is really nice. It's some sort of a wood flute. I'm not totally sure specifically what kind of flute it is, but it's a lovely sound, and the groove is all sizzle. It's all just, which many of you probably know that sound. Over on the right, that's some castanets, and it's matched by some clap

over on the left. It's a very crackly groove and it's all sizzle. There's no thump and there's no pop in this groove. It's such a nice melody, such a nice performance. It skips along on the surface. This is a very high energy, very lelting kind of a piece that never goes too deep and never really digs in. Or at least that's how it was in the original 2002 release of the game. Eleven years later in 2013, Nintendo re-released the Wind Waker as the Wind Waker H.D. on the Nintendo Wii U, and they actually made some changes to the soundtrack. One of the most dramatic changes was a single instrument that they added to the Dragon Roost Island music. Somewhere in between 2002 and 2013, someone in Nintendo came to the correct

conclusion that what Dragon Roos Island really needed was some bottom end, so they hired a really good upright bass player to lay down a baseline, and man, it paid off. I mean, listen to this stuff. You can really hear the bass player's fingers on the fretboard of the upright bass. I really love that sound. It's that boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like he kind of pops his fingers onto the neck of the instrument, which adds another percussive element to this as well, and really just adds this nice amount of bottom end to the group without dramatically changing the character of the piece. It's such a beautiful tune and such an evocative melody. It's no wonder the Zelda fans are so attached to this piece of music, and it actually

also features in yet another of my favorite Zelda musical callbacks, again in Breath of the and one that really encapsulates the legend of Zelda's musical identity. After braving the treacherous, storm-shrutted mountains, Link comes upon a strange sight, a peaceful village in the trees, home of the Ritos, a group of flying bird people who still live free in Hyrule. You remember Koss, who stops by the stables to play a poniose's theme on his accordion? Koss actually lives here,

and as Link climbs into the treetops, you can almost feel the chilly alpine air blowing through the pine boes. A lush orchestral swell calls your eyes out to the horizon, to the wind and the sky and the furthest reaches of the kingdom, and a familiar melody begins to play. And that's it. That's the musical magic of Zelda. That's why every time I play one of these games, I feel like I'm coming home. It's the music that takes me there, those anthems and lullabies, motifs and jingles that tell me that no matter which version of high world I'm exploring this time around, it's all part of the same saga, the same story that I've been playing through since I was a little kid. I'm riding into an open field, and I'm home. I'm sailing onto an open sea, and I'm home. I'm soaring through the sky, miles above the earth, and I'm home.

I'm questing through some volcanic dungeon or bedding down in a mysterious treetop village you're getting lost in a fog-shrouted forest but I'm home wherever I am in my life whatever else I might be doing I'm playing Zelda and I'm home

and that'll do it for my analysis of the music of the legend of Zelda I hope you enjoyed it I had a lot of fun with this one and I hope it gave you a better sense of just how beautifully cohesive that series' music is And while Koji Kondo is, of course, an integral part of that musical identity, I do want to recognize the other composers who worked on music that I talked about on this episode. Of course, Kentonagata, who I mentioned composed music for Wind Waker, and The Breath of the Wild Scorer, a beautiful scorer,

was composed by Monica Katowaka, Yasuaki, Uwata, and Hajime Wakai. If you like this episode and you're into video games, you probably know that I make a video game podcast, but if you didn't and you want to hear me talk about video games every week, check out Triple Click. That's another podcast that I make, along with my friends. friends, Maddie Myers, and Jason Schreier. We have a great time doing that.

We talk all about games, and sometimes we even talk about game music, so I'll put a link for that down in the show notes. Also, down in the show notes, you can find links for PayPal and Patreon if you want to support the show, and I really appreciate everyone who supports the show. Like I say, this really is just me and you guys, so if you want to support it, I'll keep on making it. There's also links for my newsletter, the Strong Song Store, where you can buy merch, playlists, all kinds of stuff.

This episode's Outro Soloist is the Great Bay Area saxophonist Charles McNeil, so stick around for Charles and I'll see you in two weeks for more strong songs.