The second Four Seasons
Just like Vivaldi many years before him, Grant Kirkhope has been given the opportunity to express in musical form the natural environments brought forward by the dynamic changing of the temperate seasons in some parts of planet earth. Unlike the Italian composer though, there is no grand overarching suite with their own melodic sections but instead your typical Banjo-Kazooie spin whose scope consists on getting extra juice by mapping the same unrelentingly catchy melody to different environments only on the strength of the arrangement and orchestration, a technique found all across the score in the series that finds its natural conclusion in this multi-level. It better be a memorable melody lest the player gets tired of the multiple variations to be found here.
You expected the lava world by now, the ultimate stakes, the least environmentally friendly level. But no, here is a cute forest instead. However, the twist is that these woods are dynamic and progressive unlike any of the previous worlds in the game. Enemies dress for the occasions, the color palette is modified, animals change their behaviour depending of the season, plants grow, water freezes, Kazooie raises a baby eagle into adulthood and Mumbo goes on vacation; the level just lends itself to all kinds of metamorphoses based on the real world occurrence of seasons, introducing time unlike the previous static levels. Its closest parallelism with Super Mario 64 would be the similarly alliteratively named Tick Tock Clock, which also has a dynamic twist that is influenced by how the player enters the level and has a mostly vertical layout. In the case of Click Clock Wood, this vertical layout is also the central landmark, which is a humongous tree that puts to the test the platforming skills the game collected throughout its run (there are even floating platform unbefitting to the more realistic concept of the series); this is a platforming game after all even if it relies more on exploration than the plumber.
Musical Analysis
Structure: {I – ABA'(C) A’B’D – I – CA’B’ }
Tempo: 210 / 180 / 160 / 120
Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Ionian/Major
Green, yellow, red, blue. Like this innovative world, the music also adopts its own colors depending on the season; this is of course no problem for Grant Kirkhope since this was a technique he familiarized himself with when composing the score for Banjo-Kazooie, arranging time and time again the same main level melodies to adapt to whatever was the situation at hand. In many ways, this music goes back to the roots, first literally, as Click Clock Wood was the very first composition Grant presented to the team when the direction of the project took the route of a cute mascot platform as opposed to epic pirate fantasy adventure, following on the steps of the groundbreaking Mario 64 and the other work in process at Rare such as the cute Twelve tales: Conker 64, which was also destined to eventually receive an overhaul. Grant composed the bulk of the tune with only the concept of mascot platform in mind; there was no talk of forest or anything of the sort, just a matter of proving he could write a memorable tune that could be looped endlessly like those of Mario. Surprisingly, although being from the first cohort of tracks specifically for the Banjo project, it survived mostly intact in the final product, even though the musical direction had changed drastically midway and many tracks outright discarded; not only that but it is Click Clock Wood which lends its motif to the main theme of the entire series, the opening notes of the melody serving as the basis for the overture musical theme of the cartridge.
Grant started developing the track known as ‘House’; it seems the concepts of seasons was present in some form to some degree at the early stages since there were already two versions for summer and autumn respectively:
House (Autumn)
House (Summer)
The songs were perhaps meant either for Banjo and Kazooie’s house, the house tree of Click Clock Wood or for Nabnut, the squirrel; the melody, however, was very much already in place.
Although Grant himself comments that Click Clock Wood is not as representative of the Banjo-Kazooie musical direction due to the lack of odd harmony and tritone intervals (no Kirkhope cadence either), the final version has some changes that make it more frenetic and retains the emphasis on giving protagonism to the low brass pouncing.
There is a second and third way in which the track goes back to its roots in the overall musical scheme of things. When first thinking about the score, all that Grant knew was that it had to be tuneful and that he did not want to imitate that big band jazz type of music from the Mario series. The characters and the world presented are straight from the golden era of American animation, that means Click Clock Wood ends up as the most pure representation of a cartoon score, using the same influences from cartoons back then like vaudeville, ragtime, foxtrot, show tune standards and music hall; the track could perfectly underscore one of the Silly Simphonies shorts from Walt Disney, back when cartoons accompanied music instead of the other way around.
The presence of all four seasons pretty much requires to feature the entire cartoon orchestra used throughout the game—conspicuously, the baritone sax, a.k.a the definitive Banjo-Kazooie instrument, is absent, another oddity of this track with respect to the others. The harmony is the most straightforward from all of the worlds in the game as per belonging to a bygone era and musical direction, just the good ol’ Is, IVs and Vs—alongside a destabilizing breakdown—are enough for this earworm melody that uses the characteristic accidentals and passing notes that give flavour to these styles. The cadence of the melody is straight from early standards of American music as exemplified in songs like ‘Oh, You Beautiful Doll’:
After getting the hang of the basic harmonic and melodic profiles it is just a matter of having fun with the arrangements, playing the tune in different styles, with an army of animals helping alongside to cement the vibe of each season. Spring is, naturally, the most energetic of the seasons; all animals have just woken up from hibernation, the trees have brand new green leafs, the climate is perfect for going out. In this case, it is al about the birds, the emphasis on woodwinds being the standard way of representing these flying creatures from the times of classical music to today. The piece starts quickly, with an unique intro not found in the other seasons representing the dawn of a new day, where birds are the first to wake up and then proceed to sing and wake everyone else; a similar device is used in the classical cartoon song used for morning music, the woodwinds playing a trill that begins the new day.
The piece uses the pan flute as a more natural sounding instrument than the orchestral one, it enters into a rapid trill between C5 and A5 (the same figure is used for the sound effect when the player collects feathers). After that, the melody starts accompanied by interjections from parrots accentuating the ends of phrases in beats that have silence; the sonic space of some of the animal sounds is right at the boundary between sound effect and music, the birds chirping at moments in line with the beat (during Autumn you can see them crossing said boundary, sometimes becoming sound effect and sometimes musical information, the difference comes down to teleology or intention vs apparent randomness), creating an amalgam that feels at home with the orchestration and flavour of the music. Alongside them there is a new instrument that plays very low but still barely pitched and harmonically meaningful marimba sounds, sounding as if woodpeckers are working on this immense tree. The second question-answer block from the A section repeats the same melody but adding a lower voice harmonizing in sixths and fifths courtesy of whatever bird is represented by the clarinet. The harmony goes back and forth between C and G.
The song remains sparse for the first iteration of the B section, adding little percussion instrumentw to slowly build up the track; the harmony passes to go from F to C this time around—going to the IV is usual for contrasting sections—then the piece goes back to its A motif, differentiating it with a countermelody of the clarinet. Following this we get the offbeat show tune influence thanks to the chromatically descending breakdown that is heavily syncopated, a common device and snippet in swing jazz music, changing abruptly between emphasis on down beats and upbeats, as if the orchestra just tripped down the stairs and then managed to get on their feet just in time to continue playing. The harmony descends chromatically from C to F.
The entire band precipitously enters the song, the tuba with its music hall influence marching and giving the Banjo-Kazooie quota since harmonically there will not be any odd chords; same for the woody marimba that is in charge of the countermelody. Birds join into the chorus of the melody for the new B section before the interlude. Meanwhile, the clarinet is playing a particular accompaniment figure in pseudo sixteenth notes, feeling as if it is going slower than the rest of the track, just floating in the air and putting the emphasis on the upbeat by silencing the downbeat, typically used for mimicking the way birds fly in the sky when pictured moving their wings up and then down.
The interlude is where everyone snaps their fingers and claps. Grant uses the “coyote howl” motif straight from Western films, first used on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and then reused and parodied in countless cartoons and films. So there are clearly more animals in these woods that are just waking up too and can be heard from long distances echoing; the wild wilderness indeed. After the short interlude the A melody returns naked again, just accompanied by the sounds of percussion and birds. The new melodic harmonization puts the previously low voice at the top and the standard melody in a lower third, interchanging what the listener feels as the main melody. The tuba has the opportunity to become a main player for a short while before being suddenly interrupted by a reprise of the intro and the breakdown that follows. The track is capped off with yet another pass of the A and B sections. Spring is over, and it serves as the foundation for the rest. It has the most sections and the faster tempo naturally; nature is booming during this time.
Summer is a lazier time. It feels heavy, slower and more mature. The tempo throughout the seasons gets progressively slower. The birds are replaced with a chorus of bees, which fit the yellow color palette and are preparing to pollinate the flowers that blossomed during spring. It is in waltz time. There is just a harmony establishing intro as opposed to an original one like in spring. The main melodic difference is the call and response between the instruments and the bees, the working insects filling the void that was there on the melody for spring; similarly to the ragtime cadence featured in spring, this void is filled with a motif straight from British music hall.
The other major difference is that there is no coyote howl section here, going back right away to the standard A melody.
Here comes Autumn and it has many similarities with a sense of evening; in fact, this whole suite could work for the notions of morning, afternoon, evening and night altogether since there are many parallels between them and the respective seasons. Autumn is the season when the duration of daylight becomes noticeably shorter after all, and the temperature cools considerably. Day length decreases and night length increases. During fall, deciduous trees begin to shed their leaves, acquiring a reddish color. The music is more relaxed and laidback, more sparse. The frogs return from the swamp in order to lend their voices alongside the few remaining birds which are no SFX for the most part but truly a part of the orchestration. The bassoon takes center stage as the more mature and wise instrument of the bird ensemble, appropriate for owls and other nighttime creatures. The time signature goes to a 4/4 and the style acquires more of a foxtrot dance, a smooth, progressive dance characterized by long, continuous flowing movements across the dance floor; it is similar in its look to waltz, although the rhythm is in a 4/4. Think the main theme of Singing in the Rain, something happy but laidback.
There is a new cadence to the melody in place of the silence during spring; this figure is likely to be based in similarly old school music cadences from music halls and cartoons. The melody begins completely alone, only accompanied by the ambient sounds of the game. The major difference is the ending of the piece, with a section that plays the melody in slow motion and only selecting the core notes that make it recognizable; these are the very last leafs falling down till there are none left. The composer creates a delay effect naturally by decreasing the volume of subsequent notes on the pan flute, creating a more natural sounding echo.
During winter it is just a matter of returning to the style of Freezeezy Peak. Even so, it is more moderate and calm; animals are gone altogether since they are hibernating. Only the icy instruments remain. There are still Christmas elements like the jingle bells and light bells, played in more subdued fashion. Naturally it is the slower of the bunch, based on early Christmas standards. Pizzicatos dominate the track since their quick attack is also appropriate for the cold feeling just like that of the celesta or glockenspiel. The energy is totally depleted by this point so there aren’t any new section besides the recurrent A and B themes.
The bear and the bird have finally traversed all the required environments, surmounting unthinkable dangers and making friends and enemies along the way; but the worst is still ahead. The time is ripe to finally conquer the evil witch who will put them to the test in a very literal sense. Before that though, there are two animals that are still waiting to sing their own part.
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