Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Sharp's Curse

Enchanted tunes can also be evil

Koji Kondo back at it again in capturing exactly the meaning of a word in musical form. This is a tension filed track for when you are slowly being cursed, and it has all of the standard elements to make you feel claustrophobic and that something needs to be done quickly. The theme of Sharp’s Melody of Darkness is here to rob you of your soul, cast by an angry spirit to which not even the powerful Song of Healing can do anything to soothe the hatred. Sharp is conducting the piece, so his baton moves to the tempo of the music and, frighteningly, we can even see previous beings who fell prey of his loathsome dirge, lulled into an eternal slumber by the cursed melody.

In the Ikana region we find a pair of estranged brothers separated by envy, anger, and by regret. Flat and Sharp, named after altered natural musical notes to bring to home the point that these composers are really in an unnatural position. Interestingly, the game is not explicit about the origin and development of their discord, they just had a falling out and only the “song of tears”, composed by the brother Flat during his long imprisonment, can pacify his brother’s soul; it is needed because Sharp holds sway over the source of water within this region.

With this pair of brothers—with designs inspired by the popular Nintendo characters Mario and Luigi— we start to identify a narrative musical motif in the land of Ikana, and how music has power to manipulate souls and spirits. We get a ‘Melody of Darkness’ apt for draining the soul; shortly after we will find how music is also used to repel spirits, a song that represents sadness and anger, songs also for encapsulating souls in statues. it seems that the curse of the people of Ikana may have something to do with the way they were experimenting with souls, perhaps a long process ultimately culminating in gaining the power of encapsulating spirits within their burial masks with the discovery of the Song of Healing Link has been using throughout his adventure. However, it all remains speculation, deepening its connection to the mysterious lost kingdom of Kucha, which was also renown all across the Silk Road for the music of its people.

Musical Analysis

Structure: Section 1 / Section 2

Time Signature: 4/4

Tempo: 60

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: E Diminished

The music here has all the trappings of the melodic horror genre, not based around creepy sound design but using the orchestral instruments to convey the sense of dread. It is an ostinato against a clock-like background counting the seconds of life you have left. The ostinato is then doubled an octave up to create an effect as if the music is rising and rising indefinitely. The low piano has a dynamic panning left and right to make you feel cornered; it has the loudest note at the beginning of each measure, slowly falling in volume unit the next measure, unnerving the players when they don’t know the trick to make it stop.

The piano and the low strings alternate between forming a tritone and a perfect fourth. The string ostinato consists of question-answer blocks where the question is always the one rising in chromatic steps and then a perfect fourth, while the answers alternate between one predominantly descending and the second which ends very high after jumping a tritone.

The tempo of the piece is selected to be the same as the speed of a clock counting seconds. a classic technique for when not acting on time can mean death. The piano here is the one giving us the sense of inescapable time.

With the emblematic Song of Storms, Link manages to use the song Flat composed to get rid of his brother’s curse, Sharp’s soul will be healed and we will recover the river of Ikana. Still, this ghost story is about to get more scary, uncanny and uglier.