Move over Mozart, here comes Zelda
Who needs Mozart or Bach when you have great video game music?
On Feb. 21, 1986, a piece of music that has become a mainstay of many modern symphony-orchestra repertoires had its debut. The Legend of Zelda overworld theme, composed by Japan’s Koji Kondo for the first entry in the video game series, has become synonymous with one of the most successful franchises in Nintendo’s history.
It comes as no surprise that the music to accompany a game that sold over 80 million copies has become globally popular in its own right. Rumoured to have been written in one day, the theme regularly ranks in lists of the top 10 video game themes of all time.
In fact, the music of The Legend of Zelda has been packaged into a multimedia tour whose latest incarnation is the Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses show coming to Vancouver this week. Alongside music from such revered games as Final Fantasy and Mortal Kombat, the Zelda theme is part of a worldwide trend of showcasing the work of artists who aren’t part of the standard pops set list. The Beatles, Burt Bacharach and John Barry (James Bond) are being binned, so Kondo, Martin O’Donnell (Halo) and Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones) can sell tickets to today’s audiences. Get Bach, indeed.
Conductors such as Vancouverbased Kevin Zakresky now wield their batons not for the baroque, but for the digital.
“The music of Zelda lends itself to establishing a long-standing orchestral tradition because, even in its earliest versions, it has this epic nature with really great melodies and harmonies,” said Zakresky. “Orchestras across North America and the world have been honouring film music for years, and when you look at it realistically, film is where most people hear the majority of orchestral music. In many cases, because of the popularity of the medium, it’s not unlikely that many more people have heard the music of John Williams over that of Mozart.”
To classically trained musicians such as Zakresky, it isn’t a big jump from appreciating the artistry of Oscar-winning film composers such as Williams to the awardwinning scores of Kondo.
“While the Americans were really owning the world of film music, composers over in Japan were writing these incredible scores to video games, which now have over a 30-year legacy to draw from,” he said. “I’m a baroque specialist with choral-music beginnings who never imagined conducting these huge orchestras with horn sections and a battery of percussionists performing this kind of music. But I’m really deeply excited to be doing it, because Kondo has this harmonic genius.”
The 56-year-old Kondo was one of the first people hired by Nintendo specifically to create music and sound effects for the company’s games. Before he came up with the Legend of Zelda theme, he had already crafted the musical theme for the overworld in Super Mario Bros. This is arguably one of the most ubiquitous songs ever written and it has been included in over 50 different concert tours. Thirty-two years after its launch, Kondo’s concept that you could make music that could be repeated over and over in gameplay without getting boring seems to hold fast.
“I had never played Zelda, because while my friends were video kids, I was a piano kid,” Zakresky said. “My twin brother played the game constantly and, for some reason, I never really noticed how great the music was. Now I play Zelda for a living.”
He plays Zelda with arenas and a production setup that he describes as “pretty spectacular.” Contemporary attention spans being what they are, it wouldn’t be enough to have the performance alone encompass the music. It was, after all, created to accompany active viewing and audience participation. The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses is the fourth quest, as organizers phrase it, in the live musical performances. To better understand the popularity of the series, keep in mind that there are 38 dates on four continents.
“It’s pretty spectacular and interesting walking out on stage and having thousands of people screaming at the opening of a show,” Zakresky said. “In classical music, we usually are quite pleased about a few hundred people reverentially clapping. It’s more than a bit of a cool shift.”
Considering that Zakresky has a resume that includes working with such heavy hitters as Chor Leoni and the Vancouver Chamber Choir, and directing the Prince George Symphony, it’s saying something when he raves about the Zelda tours. He is hired, along with another U.S.-based conductor, to divide up the tour dates. Unlike a conductor for a civic orchestra, he isn’t actively involved in selecting the players, as the tours are booked more as a piecemeal deal. This puts another level of adventure onto the experience.
“The choir and the orchestra that I meet is often playing it for the first time and working for me for the first time, but this is not unusual in classical circles,” he said. “Usually, it’s pretty exceptional players such as the recent dates in Los Angeles, where I was working with the orchestra that plays the Oscars. They could play anything and are top calibre.”
One of the biggest challenges to date was a crash course in basic Spanish to improve his ability to communicate with the musicians on the tour’s dates in Mexico. Zelda, it appears, gives both the conductor and the players an opportunity to do something outside of their normal comfort levels.
“Depending on the hall, we usually do a three-hour rehearsal so that all the technical aspects of miking the players and so on can be balanced out,” he said. “On rare occasions, we might get to perform acoustically, which is a real treat.”
Of course, digital-age music means digital-age issues. While he’s never experienced any kind of system crashes on the Zelda concerts, he did run into a problem in Fort Worth, Texas, on a different tour.
“It was on a tour titled Replay, which brings together 20 different video games and the click track wasn’t working at all,” he said. “This wasn’t as big a deal as that show doesn’t have all this video, but it’s still a significant challenge to work without it. We did and it went perfectly, all good.”
Ultimately, what is it like for someone who has devoted most of their life to their craft to be plying their trade performing music that cynics could say was primarily written as sonic window dressing for the joystick-jockeyed antics of elfin heroes and cartoon princesses? Zakresky said he’s pleasantly surprised by the way Kondo has consistently displayed new ideas this deep into both the game series and his expansive career.
“His tunes are influenced by a lot of composers people are automatically bound to love, with harmonic chord progressions that would be right at home with French Romantic composers mixed with some really delightfully unusual changes and ideas that are Japanese,” he said. “Learning the score at my piano before conducting, I would find these passages where it would be something that my harmony teacher would have been dead set against, but it sounded really fresh and revolutionary.”
It’s not that the composer didn’t know the rule of such and such chord progression, but rather that they did — and “knew exactly how to break them to make something exciting,” Zakresky said.