Inside The Score - Banjo-Tooie - Isle O'Hags

Dark whimsy

The return to Banjoland is not a pleasant one for the bear and the bird. The tone and atmosphere has shifted, twisted slightly; everything feels more somber, dirtier and larger than life. The game follows the returning protagonists two years later as they attempt to stop the plans of the witch Gruntilda alongside two of her sisters, who intend to vaporize the inhabitants of what turns out to be an island setting. This is not anymore a fairy tale Snow white parody but a world threatening affair. The sequel goes for the bigger, more is more approach; more expansive worlds , more moves, darker and more difficult and, as required, more music. It also has a decidedly more surreal and cynical sense of humor. The witch Gruntilda is now a living pile of bones, Jinjo families go extinct and main characters are seen being killed or converted into living dead.

The music for Banjo-Tooie, composed alongside the games Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong 64, is also decided more ominous; Spiral Mountain is no longer a banjo featured bluegrass tune but an elegy for a world that has been lost. The main hub world is the Isle o’Hags, the grander world from which the entirety of Gruntilda’s castle is but just a small part. The track is the direct successor to the Gruntida’s Lair cue, returning with the skipping through the forest oom-pah rhythm combined with the witchcraft association of the bassoons dating as far back as the piece The Sorceress’ Apprentice and the orchestral bass drum. Yet it sounds decidedly less playful, with composer Grant Kirkhope relying on his disquieting and more mysterious side of his characteristic playfully sinister style. With the mallets gone are also gone their cartoony or childish associations, Isle o’Hags sounding more like an orchestral piece, retaining the playful rhythm but tingeing it with a depressing harmony, melodies and tone; more tenebrous.

Jumpy pizzicatos are replaced by their standard strings counterparts and the comical baritone saxophone is no more here. After all, we are against not one but three witches running a killing machine. The song captures the more somber and dirtier tone of Banjo Too, with a word that is still cartoony yet more decadent and polluted. Pretty much what a normally happy world threatened by destruction would sound like.

Of course we still rely mostly on the C key with all kinds of modal craziness. The tritone progression is back with a vengeance, appearing not even in its major form but the harsher diminished chord; stuff is bleak indeed.

Grant himself feels the music of Banjo-Tooie is more sophisticated, complex and mature. Indeed for the overworld the melody itself is not a question-answer phrase then transposed to a major key as in the original melody of Gruntilda’s Lair but a long form melodic phrase that serves as the basis for various sections, playing and transforming this motif like some classical composers would.

Musical Analysis

The main vamp that opens the hub world is Cm – F#dim, with the less playful strings when compared to the pizzicatos of Gruntilda’s Lair. Then we get to the next favorite chord combination for the composer, the bVI giving us the harmonic progression:

Cm – F#dim

Ab – Ddim

G(5)7

The melody playing within the melodic minor and natural minor profile of C for the head and tail respectively plus its tritone note F# following the harmony progression. The entire phrase is then repeated with the clarinet added on top and a small flourish variation on the melody at the end.

For the B section it changes to play around with a B diminished profile going from Bm to Ab and then to a Dm; yeah, Banjo-Kazooie did not have such a depressing chord progression. Only Grant Kirkhope could get such a catchy tune out of such dissonant intervals and harmony.

B section harmony:

Bm – Ab – Bm – Dm

The melody for the B Section also has the same rhythmic profile as the main melody of Gruntilda’s Lair from Banjo-Kazooie.

But then the shenanigans of going back to a C key in preparation for the A Section reprise take the melody over the the Kirkhope cadence (bII – V – i) which is based around the tritone chord of the dominant or what we could call the secondary tritone of C which would be the zany harmonic language of Grant Kirkhope and his Banjo series based around tritones. So we go to the Db to G7 vamp while the melody plays with the harmonic minor tetrachord of the C key until we finally reach the first note of the A section in smooth fashion.

Since the Banjo series songs are longer than standard N64 fare like Mario 64 we end up in a revamped A section with more accompaniment. This new A section only repeats the melodic phrase once before going into the C section which plays around with the main motif of the the cue, creating a kind of fugue with the strings and the flute melody which is a more distorted tune than the original that uses the natural minor profile as opposed to the melodic minor. The oom-pah rhythms become more playful and the bassoon starts a walking ostinato. Yet the harmony, same as in A Section, is relentlessly sinister, creating this uncanny sound of what a normal cartoony happy world would sound like in its twisted state.

The piece then transposes aggressively the melody one step and a half to what could be now deemed an Eb Lydian profile by way of the Bb major chord. The rate of chord changes also slows down, maintaining a Eb now major chord and then Bm alongside its respective B Aeolian/Minor profile for longer. The same melody has a different flavour due to being now on top of a major chord and it is cut short in order to reach its tail faster, which is a variation of the original tail from A Section.

Then we get one last B section in its original key which connects us back to the beginning. The melody is now played by the strings while the flutes play what was the string accompaniment. As the responsible ones for the low end of the piece, tubas limit themselves to playing the standard muddy-less root plus fifth of chords.

The juxtaposition between playful rhythms and sinister harmony is what makes the Banjo music have this uncanny tone. As Banjo-Tooie was a larger game than its predecessor, Kirkhope had twice the memory space in the game’s cartridge for sound effects and music, allowing him to create even more variations of his dynamic scores. Like the game’s predecessor, the themes heard in the score were designed to be interactive, which dynamically change to reflect the player’s location. His favorite cue for the game was the one for Atlantis, another pretty underwater level.