Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Dark World Dungeon / Dungeon of Shadows

Memento mori

We are getting closer to Ganondorf (or at least the wizard Agahnim who ultimately fulfills the same human side of evil role in this game) and that means getting closer to the profiles and motifs of his own theme song (which naturally was the theme of Agahnim at this point) on this dungeon theme which will go on to become the single most heard track in the score due to being featured in eight dungeons from the game where you are expected to get lost a long time solving puzzles and fighting minions; it seems the philosophy of making the duration of tracks correspond to how much you are expected to be in a place is not in place here. The goal might be to slowly drive you insane with such a repetitive and short cue looping so many times. It even dispenses with the long introduction in free time of the previous dungeon cue in favour of just the unrelenting tremolo ostinato of the high strings.

Musical Analysis

In fact it is as if the intro of the light world dungeons actually morphed into this piece seeing as how the composition shares a lot of its ideas and kernel with the Light World dungeon opening. The main motif here, used and reused like the Fifth of Bethoveen, is based around the one semitone down movement with that shuffle feel provided by a dotted eight note which puts the long notes of the low melody on the upbeat. This is similar to the tail end of the intro to the previous dungeon and also similar to what will go on to become the iconic Ganondorf’s Theme which debuted on this game. However this is plainly more scary inducing than just sinister; the dark world dungeons are not ancient, mysterious places anymore but truly house traps full of critters committed to the labor of killing you; their designs are more disturbing (just take a look at the curious shape featured here). Naturally, we get diminished profiles; parallel harmony and tritones and chromaticism galore. The tremolo strings slowly climbing towards more and more tension just like Ganondorf’s Theme does.

The main accompaniment is the tremolo strings prominent since the opening of the game. It is a tritone interval that is moved in parallel often by that semitone down figure, the main motif of the composition. It changes each bar and initially it seems to be a four chord osinato since this pattern repeats twice but then it goes to different heights, just like the Ganondorf’s Theme and the counterpart dungeon theme do.

Like many other A Link to the Past cues, a single sample is enough to convey the goal. Like the original Zelda dungeon theme, the melody is taken by the low end, the usual inversion to the overworld dynamic. The melody is all made pretty much with the semitone down motif of the track, just varying slightly the rhythm in some parts and jumping by tritones or minor thirds, covering all the notes of the chromatic profile, meaning all notes. The tail here is similar to the tail of the Light world Dungeon cue with many long notes pilling on top of each other as if they were echoes through the walls of the dungeons. They end on a single diminished chord in open voicing Dbdim. Spoooky.

And with that we can go into the few and short battle cues found within the score.