Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Music Box House

Uncanny valley

“That is the mask of those who roam this world with the most lingering regrets!”

After the ridiculousness of the boat cruise, having to calm a crying baby and then a band of rockstars playing a part in the destiny of their land, Ikana could not be left out of this whimsical pattern. Turns out, after the disturbing Sharp’s curse is calmed, we start to hear little carnival music and moreover, it is what drives out the evil spirits roaming the land; they want to be as far from happiness after all. If Link manages to relearn the classic Song of Storms, he will be able to ward of the evil spirits dwelling at the river bank, managing to revert the water flow to the desert and restart the operation of the music box house.

What we get here is an analogous to how the Song of Storms was originally connected to the organ grinder from Ocarina of Time, also playing European folk oom-pah rhythms to make water flow. It is just that now the situation is in a giant edition, with a brand new cue playing a happy oom-pah tune, a positive counterpart to the ‘Windmill Hut’ theme, a little return to the Dutch sensibilities, their windmills pumping water and their rich history with barrel organ culture. Who knows what inspired this scenario or what came first: the Song of Storms, its relationship with water modification, or the phonograph connection.

However, this is Majora’s Mask showing its uncanny teeth at its more vicious level. Hearing the music against the disturbing cutscene and sounds emitted by the undead is quite the experience, not to mention that watching the door make a click sound is really frightening. Who knows what lurks inside that seemingly happy, whimsical looking house. There is a bad feeling about this already, but why? Shouldn’t the happy music be a signal of everything going fine? The power of context is at play here. In fact, the happy music on this context is perhaps more effective than any low dissonant music could ever hope to be. It plays with the uncanny as many horror soundtrack have, juxtaposing the setting of a comfortable place, like a fair or carnival with the land of the dead, where it definitively shouldn’t be.

This plays out with the trope of creepy circus music, where the juxtaposition of child-like music with horror is truly haunting , often sounding as if it’s being played on an old, rusty calliope. To make it even scarier, it’s often source music (diegetic) in an abandoned area to indicate that it is not so abandoned as the characters thought. Unlike the three other regions of Termina, here there are no bustling settlements around or amenities for tourists, nor is there the anticipation of festivity and happiness; Ikana is a place that exists in stagnation and ruin, a place whose time was a long time ago. Seeing the first signs of life is unnerving to say the least.

What we don’t know yet is that what we are going to meet is just a little girl, perhaps one of the most courageous characters Link will ever come across in his adventures, affronting a very difficult situation that surely would break any less resilient soul. The reason mummies have been gathering around her house is that they are waiting for the one of their kind who is trapped on the basement of the house by the little girl, but why would a small child have locked up a mummy in her house? Link tries to approximate her but she is evasive. She is definitively hiding something. In a moment of distraction for the little girl who just went outside perhaps to get some water or see what is going on, Link sneaks into the house, everything is normal apparently, except that on the basement there is a research lab. In a series of masterfully directed horror tropes, the terrible image of a man in the process of becoming the undead will haunt any demographic, and for some, the only solution to the puzzle will be to turn off the console and play some other game, like Kirby. Those brave enough to continue seeing this abomination will either way have their hearts break upon seeing the struggle the little girl, named Pamela, has with protecting her beloved father who has basically become a monster. The closet where he is trapped s even full of Japanese ofuda, or spirit talismans, which in Japanese Shinto and Buddhism are used to ward off bad fortune. The girl really has faith that her father is not totally gone, even lending her plush toy for him to entertain himself.

It’s a moving scene emblematic of Majora’s Mask, still finding ways to balance a deeply affecting theme with whimsical scenarios. After the cure, Pamela will keep protecting her father by not letting him know what happened—she even pointed some speakers playing this ‘Farewell to Gibdos’ tune at full volume directly at the closet— Poor girl seems to have tried everything in her power. It’s implied that she has been feeding him, entertaining him and cleansing him for some time.

The cure is, of course, the Song of Healing, the very last (or perhaps the only) exorcism Link will perform with the teachings of the Happy Mask Salesman. This time to heal a person that is alive. In doing so, Link gets a small fragment of the spirit of one of the undead and will now be able to communicate with the creatures that will lead him to the heart of the Ikana kingdom. The fact that we don’t get another transformation mask in this area gives the game a sense of novelty since it refuses to follow a predictable structure or pattern.

Musical Analysis

Structure: Section 1 / Section 2

Time Signature: 3/4 (6/8)

Tempo: 180

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: C Ionian/Major

Going back to the cue from the music box, it is nothing that Kondo could not pull off in a matter of minutes, already having experience composing carnival music for ghost houses in the video game Super Mario 64 or mini-game music for various Nintendo games:

The same context in a slightly more humorous fashion

Here he continues the same idea, basically bringing again the accordion sounds and oompapa rhythms, this time with the characteristic tuba sound that was absent from previous attempts at the genre and the cadences and child-like sensibilities of the melody.

The oom-pah sound is usually made by the tuba alternating between the root (tonic) of the chord and the 5th (dominant) — this sound is said to be the oom. The pah is played on the off-beats by higher-pitched instruments such as the clarinet, accordion or trombone. Oompah is often associated with Volkstümliche Musik, a form of popular German music; also super popular with the street organ culture prominent in the Netherlands and other close countries.

We get the tuba going back and forth between C and G, beginning a progression based around the major chords of the scale, the I – IV and V. The melody makes use of accidentals, or notes outside the scale to add spice, like the F#, G# and A#. Rest of the instruments are from the orchestrated version of the Song of Storms.

The harmony for Section 1 goes simply as:

C – G – C – F – C – G – C

With chords sustained throughout multiple bars.

Well, actually the accordion gives the chords a more complicated flavor, making the G, a G7/9 sonority.

The ocarina and the glockenspiel have interchanged roles with respect to the original Song of Storms; now the glockenspiel is doing the main melody and the ocarina harmonizing it, in thirds. The melody uses a repeated motif creating well defined question-answer blocks with easily identified cadences as befits of this style of music.

There is time in the piece for a second section where the tuba drops off, letting the accordion bring the full oom-pah experience and the melodic instruments left to play in unison a fast, arpeggiated melody, where the harmonic profile is descending by a full tone and then a semitone at the end, creating, by virtue of voice leading the progression:

F – C – G7 – C

Still remaining positive and without modal sensibilities unlike the more mystic ‘Windmill Hut’ cue.

The oom-pah pattern is slightly altered to create variation between sections.

There is an unique effect where it is possible to hear the Ikana Valley cue and the Music Box House cue at the same time, something made possible perhaps due to the extra memory provided by the expansion pack. Until this point, the music being played had to fade out in order to transition to the new cue. The tuba from the cue also appears to be dynamic, disappearing when Link is not moving.

Now things are about to get more epic as Link embarks onto the heart of the kingdom to see what was it like and meet face to face with the king himself. He will have to travel through some grottoes with his new ability of communicating with the undead. There is still more to uncover about this strange land (Circumstantially, a Gibdo knows the elemental formula for water (H2O), and another uses the word “Calcium,” terms not in use until after the Industrial Revolution. Just Majora’s Mask being Majoras Mask).

As a fun fact, it appears that the main developers of The Legend of Zelda are inserted into the game, alongside a lot of their life experiences. With Pamela’s Father we complete the main players of the original The Legend of Zelda game. It seems the appearance of this character is based around that of Takashi Tezuka, the right-hand man of Miyamoto, with Shigeru Miyamoto himself being speculated to be the inspiration behind the Happy Mask Salesman design and personality. And our own man of the hour, Koji Kondo being immortalized in none other than the infamous Tingle. Is his personality anything like the character? Could there be other developers inserted into the game?