Inside The Score - Banjo-Kazooie - Top of the Lair

Things just got serious

This is it. This is the moment when the game is telling us things are about to get real. You can smell the danger in the air, as if Gruntilda is hiding and an attack could come from any corner; she already lost her dream and we don’t really know the extent of her witchcraft. Doesn’t matter, you took away her victory, now she is done playing games with the bear and the bird. The cruelty of the game is also increased exponentially as we slowly realize the ending is not that close; the game requires of non-completionist players to get nearly one hundred percent of the jiggies and music notes in order to progress further, ensuring the player is truly prepared for the confrontation that is going to take place at the top of the castle. Grunty is indeed heavily guarded. One last effort is required. It is also good to finally be able to step into locations we had only seen through cutscenes throughout the adventure, making it all feel like a real place interconnected and a culmination.

Musical Analysis

Structure: {I – ABA’- C- B’} / Section 2

Tempo: 90 / 125

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Harmonic minor; C Aeolian/Minor

The music also communicates this sense of dread and ominous danger in the air, striving to be right at the tipping point between consonance and dissonance, Any minor nudge and the piece would fall into dissonance, driving the point of just a general sense that something wrong is about to happen, not necessarily that is happening right now; the monster is not right in front of you, it is hiding, wounded, expecting for the opportunity to take you down. Throughout the piece we will hear some of the most strangest note combinations found in the harmony of the score, beginning with the two chord intro where Grant employs the sonority of the theremin to provide what is nicknamed the Hitchcook chord, due to its heavy use by Bernard Herrmann on the films of the director such as the seminal Psycho, which codified icy with this foreboding ambience (alongside the sheer terror of the strings in the shower scene). It Is this chord precisely what is being referred as right in the goldilocks zone between consonance and dissonance; not quite a minor chord but also not quite as horror inducing as, say, a diminished major seventh chord or diminished seventh one. Those are for when you are face to face with evil. This chord is for when evil is under you, breathing in the dark. The chord. a minor major seventh, does not contain the heavy dissonant interval of the augmented fourth (the tritone) but it does contain the one produced by the minor second, between the root and the seventh. This dissonance is augmented even further when clashing this chord with the underlying arpeggios played by the celesta, which is pretty much doing its own thing, accompanying with almost the same pattern as it did back in the cousin cue ‘Grunty Beauty Steal Machine’, albeit with some chords removed and some notes slightly modified.

All in all, the harmony of this unnerving intro produced by the individual interplay of the gothic celesta and theremin instruments would be something like the complex chord progression Cm maj7 / b13 – Bbm maj7 / b13. Since the celesta does not even bother to change the harmony when the theremin is playing the Bbm, it follows that the true chord would be the dissonant chimera composed of the mix between the Bbm maj7 / b13 of the theremin with the Cm b13 of the celesta, something like Bbm7 maj7 / 9 / 11 / b13 / 13. As we can see the theory can get even more disturbing than the music itself. In reality such a chord would be meaningless, since in this context the celesta is just providing an underlying color that is doing its own thing no matter if it clashes with the one played in the theremin; they are not really meant to be happy together, just against each other.

After this the piece plays the Gruntilda melody just like it did in the Grunty beauty steal machine cutscene, the notes losing all the bounciness and shuffle; some of the notes previously heard in the upbeats are now sounding in the downbeats. However, while on that cousin track the music sounded like a parody of b-horror and monster movies from back in the day, the theremin used in cliche fashion, here the strings contribute a more menacing sound that brings the track to more serious territory. As if Grunty stopped being a Halloween pastiche and is now a being truly in possession of dangerous witchcraft. This is not a just a new reorchestration with the same tempo of the Gruntilda’s Lair cue we have heard throughout the castle; the tone has truly changed now.

Unlike the steal machine track, the celesta maintains the Cm b6 arpeggio throughout the first bars of the A section. The high strings continue to imply the Hitchcook chords, The harmony during this section being something like:

Cm maj7 / b13 – Bdim7 / #5 / #9

Just a fancy way of saying Cm to B dim with odd minor second intervals added thanks to the celesta and string pad not bothering to harmonize with each other in pleasant ways.

Section B loses all of its playfulness on this version, sounding truly sad and decayed, the delicate strum like patterns of the celesta sounding like the abandoned gothic lair this has become. After that, the A section is reinforced with the instrument representative of Gruntilda, the bassoon. She is getting closer, her laugh is even getting higher in pitch.

Yet, in contrast with the beauty steal machine cue, here there is an extra section that does include the pseudo transposition of the motif to the happier Eb major profile, found in the version heard throughout the lair. Still, it remains twisted since the harmony goes back and forth between the chord and its diminished counter part, taking with itself what was the Eb major melody into the diminished territory thanks to the F#, which gives the sinister tone. The celesta also does not help to relieve the tension, since it plays in octaves slightly delayed, its plucks sounding like the clink of one of those cursed music boxes that feel just a bit off, a haunting tune that fills the air.

The full progression for this section being something like:

Cm – Cdim9 – Cm – Cdim9 – Cm – Cdim9 – Cm – Bb

Eb – Edim – Eb – Edim – Eb – Edim – Eb – G7

The happiness of the major chords never allowed to blossom. Something definitively is not quite right.

The haunting feeling is completely dispelled when the door to the the ceiling of the castle is finally open, playing a small taste of what it is to come, a bombastic and heavy brass fanfare sounding Grunty’s motif loudly and proudly, the strings warming up those ultra fast arpeggios for when the inevitable battle against the witch finally plays out. The fanfare quickly goes to a coda, giving the harmony Cm – G7 – Cm – Abm – Cm, preparing our ears for the brass spectacle and the opening Cm to Abm progression of the mighty orchestral suite that will accompany the epic battle between the bear, the bird and the witch, alongside some special guests.