Inside The Score - Banjo-Kazooie - World Door Open

A portal to new harmonies

Another event, another overture commemorating the occasion. But since the opening of a new world is a one time special event seldom heard, the standard success cue is extended and played with more panache and bombast. It is followed by a cinematic magical cue that uses jumps in harmony profiles to create that sense of something enchanted and crazy happening on screen. This movement will be a staple of the series.

Musical Analysis

Structure: Section 1 / Section 2

Tempo: 130 (Section 1); 190 (Section 2)

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Ionian/Major

There are two moments to musicalize that follow in sequence, the actual completion of the (literal) puzzle and the cinematic showing the door to the new world slowly opening. As said, the first one is an extended version of the success cue that, instead of one single cadence, it is composed of multiple cascading ones, each one reaching higher and higher but maintaining the same two chords, C and G. It is accompanied by the characteristic suspense inducing snare roll that is ubiquitous in reward expectation settings. The trombone favors sixth intervals while the trumpets and horns do the same with thirds; usually, wider intervals translate better at the lower register due to the wave lengths of lower pitches, the physics of the overtone series and the way the human brain processes sound—at the far left of a piano only octaves will be easily recognizable, moving right fifths and fourths begin to be viable. And thirds become easily recognizable by the third or fourth octave of the keyboard. The flute follows the snare in playing an anticipation figure, in this case a trill.

The magical connotations become apparent in the spellbinding flourish of notes that make use of the Kirkhope chord movement (I – bV), something like the hopping through the circle of fifths but in a corrupted fashion—the circle of wrong fifths—thanks to the tritone, whose inversion is also a tritone; the result is that it creates a destabilizing sensation throughout with not a true key center, which is usually used for magic or other supernatural occurrences, more so if it is Banjo-Kazooie. The flute plays the standard chords moving upwards through the octaves and the clarinet harmonizes by playing each chord in second inversion. It moves back and forth from C to F#. The timbre of the theremin continues to be deployed for its magical connotations.

Grant Kirkhope has stated that this was inspired by the British short animated series called Mr Benn, where the titular character is transported to a new world in each episode. (There are similarities but it does not seem that a tritone is present as Grant claims, neither in the clothing change or when the titular Mr Benn enters the world:

This one just seems standard magical fare for quick spells. Though when entering the door it indeed has that destabilizing quality

Most likely, it is referring the coda of the main theme of the series, which does have the tritone:

In any case the music is pure Banjo-Kazooie, or rather cartoon music

The meat of the game soundtrack is of course the themes for each of the nine worlds found inside Gruntilda’s Lair. Since the main gameplay will require the player to spend a lot of time inside each world, then it follows that the composer employs longer and more structurally complex themes to maintain the momentum and also had the duty to create memorable melodies that could withstand indefinite listens undefeated. Mumbo’s Mountain is the first one heard by the player but actually one of the later compositions made for the game since, originally, this platformer had a different direction and the original music was of another kind (Nonetheless, the original melody still lives, albeit disguised as a different track). As the bear and the bird are transported to their first world, its music, whose echoes we have been hearing poring through the door, shows its true form.