Inside The Score - Banjo-Kazooie - Inside Ticker's Tower

Echoes of a previous theme

The troops are marching, marching to the rhythm of the blues, a very creepy blues indeed. One of the few remaining vestiges of the original musical direction for the game, the insides of this giant mound that serves as the centerpiece and main landmark of the level are musicalized with a slowed down version of the tune that was originally meant to be the main theme from Mumbo’s Mountain, a track that was replaced by the end of the development process due to it not fitting anymore the tritone, oom-pah, and slightly off guidelines for the new tone of the soundtrack; many early Banjo-Kazooie tunes suffered major revisions or outright replacements including Mumbo’s Muontain, Treasure Trove Cove and Freezeezy Peak (Only the very first composition made specifically for the new platformer game remains spared: Click Clock Wood, ironically the final level which supposedly would have the highest stakes and presumably the mot brooding track).

In typical Banjo-Kazooie fashion, the different subareas from the worlds tend to have the same musical composition arranged and orchestrated to fit the new ambient or situation. In normal circumstances we would have had a similar arrangement of the music from the level here; however, Grant Kirkhope felt the original composition worked just fine for this ambient and so decided to not change it. The result is a brand new cue for a small location.

The original compositions were more in line with a purely cartoonish aesthetic, the one used specifically inside the tower being based around the kooky anthem melody of Baby Elephant Walk from the film Hatari!, a movie about wildlife chases in Africa with the scenic backdrop of Meru Mountain.

Original Mumbo’s Mountain:

This proves that Mumbo already existed, that he is from the same species as the enemies and that his theme was closer in spirit to the original beta version that sounded just like Ticker’s Tower

Instead of a brand new track the theme of the termites is just a typical Banjo-Kazooie rearrangement that nobody bothered to replace with a gloomy version of the new Mumbo’s Mountain

At the early stages of the project, Grant was just testing the waters and seeing if he could write standard cartoon music for a mascot platformer, hence some of the first tunes composed had as the only guideline to be catchy and fit in a direct manner the theme of the level. It was only with the eureka moment when composing the music for Mad Monster Mansion that the team decided to go with the characteristic zany, off kilter music that would define the style of the Banjo series and make it more cohesive.

Musical Analisis

Structure: Section 0 / Section 1 / Section 2

Tempo: 130

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Ionian/Major; Db Ionian/Major

That being so, the piece we ended up hearing inside the tower consists of a standard 12-bar blues structure with the I – IV – V harmony (in dominant form, of course), the catch being that the piece is then transposed. Why? It is a matter of gameplay sensibility from the part of the composer; internally, the mound is structured as an spiral made of slopes that reach each subsequent level, something which explains the kinesthetic decision of transposing the music a half step up in the hopes of capturing and following the players’movements towards higher places, thus in this way the music does the same.

Inside Ticker’s Tower, Due to it being dangerous place full of critters, the arrangement plays with the sense of danger that only a low, menacing string section can give alongside the monster-movie trope of the theremin sliding its notes through the notes of the harmony— and whose characteristic vibrato and pitch bending is not accurately reproduced here. The bass moves with a passing tritone note.

The melody follows closely the chord changes and it is full of so called blues notes (“worried notes”) that give the flavor to the genre and separate it from typical major/minor tonalities; mostly the flat third and flat seventh. It is only a matter of emphasizing those notes that give the chords their respective dominant seventh attribute.

The blues will continue to play a part in the lives of the bear and the bird. Or more precisely, the lack of it. Since the blues is the music for when you are feeling down, then it is no wonder why in Rare games it forms the backbone of the bad news and disgraces for its characters.