The importance of musicality for a banjo and a kazoo
A new success, a new fanfare.
And not any success but one of the great successes on the game since you are either actually getting every single Jiggy in one of the worlds or opening a door that will let you progress further towards the ultimate goal of the adventure.
They opened the curtain with a musical number. They are actually named after musical instruments. So it is only fair that the natural conclusion is that instruments require music to flourish and to perform their intended task; and what is the international symbol for music in cartoons and other visual media? None other than the symbol for the eight note. Probably going back as far as silent cartoons or even before in the form of graphic storytelling, the eight note symbol (with a couple of fourth notes sprinkled here and there for variety) is code that the audience can understand easily for music being in the air, or someone singing instead of speaking. In this way, the music is “seen” since there is no way to hear it; Cartoonists untrained in music love this trope, mostly because an eighth note is immediately and unambiguously recognizable by laity as musical notation. Also, it is actually one of the most common markings in written melodies. Hence this collectathon has one more item to get your hands onto, the musical notes that allow the banjo and the kazoo to continue their concert.
Musical Analysis
Structure: Section 1 / Section 2 / Section 3
Tempo: 130 (Section 1); 150 (Section 2); 205 (Section 3)
Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Ionian/Major
In Banjo-Kazooie these eight-symbol musical notes, which are the closest equivalents to the coins in Super Mario 64—except they don’t heal, are only 100 and serve a different purpose than giving you a Jiggy— are themselves musicalized by, no, you did not guess it, not actual eight notes but just a short sound effect that consist on a flurry of notes playing a glissando similarly to how an harpist would do it, moving across a major C chord on the marimba. However, the note that saves the day and moves both this cue and the following more towards the terrain of actual music is the D note at the very end of the arpeggio; this helps the brain of the listener to anchor itself into a mini authentic cadence since the D has the illusion of creating a G chord at the end. This small musical impact rests on this single musical note since without it the piece would feel as if it were statically living in a C chord exclusively. With the D note at the end, although technically just a part of the C major scale, the brain jumbles it with the previous G note to create the illusion of a second chord. So the small snippet can be interpreted as going from C to G and then, with the last note, feeling as if it arrived to a C chord again.
This is heard more easily on the second cue, which is a longer version of the idea, extending the C chord from even lower pitches and going pretty far up—in celebration for you getting all the 100 notes in the level— It maintains the C chord, moving across the scale in a determined pattern and only lets the D play at the very end in order to get that finalizing sensation in the ear.
Moving on to the main celebratory fanfare, it maintains all the expected characteristics of this musical flourish deviced in medieval Europe to celebrate the arrival of a royal person or marking that a special occasion happened or began. The form usually involves the brass section played in a bombastic and stirring manner. The melody notes of a fanfare are often based around the major triad, usually using heroic dotted rhythms and triplets. The note door fanfare is no different, with the entire brass and orchestral percussion section from the game coming together to play triplets in a way that use chords in melodic fashion as opposed to harmonic fashion. It plays with different inversions of the C chord in order to exploit the melodic properties of their upper notes. The base harmony itself is given by the cadence at the end, made of the expected IV – V – I chords of the C scale, the trombones simply doubling the trumpets in a lower octave. The length of the music was perhaps determined by the length of the animation of Banjo marching and bowing down to the audience—as you would normally do at the end of the performance of a music concert— although the music beats don’t exactly match the movements.
Whenever a woman is capable of magic we automatically deem her a witch and burn her, or do we? In media and the Western tradition there is a second very popular trope when it comes to magical ladies. Anyone who is familiar with a fairy tale knows what it is being talked about, it is in the name of the medium after all. Banjo-Kazooie has the most standard version of this character, the good counterpart of a witch, straight from a Disney movie or rather, The Wizard of Oz; of course she also has her own theme.
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