Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Song of Soaring

The roots of the ocarina

Link is on a learning spree. The official, actual warp song from Majora’s Mask, the nasty, manic Song of Soaring is taught to Link by a stone inscription in Termina, a song that will bound him to the owl’s doppelgänger from this world and will make the hero able to soar the skies just like his owl friend. We are back to the original purpose of the musical instruments in Zelda, to transport Link across the map just like it did in the original NES game and in A Link to the Past; music and spells were always connected in this series. The imagery is not subtle, Link literally gets wings ro traverse the world of Termina.

But since this is Majora’s Mask we are talking about, this warp song will not be as pleasant nor as elegant as the ones found, for the most part, in Ocarina of Time. In fact the song is learned in the same manner as the awkward Sun’s Song from the previous game, both entering a fierce battle for the spot of least popular ocarina tune.

Musical Analysis

Structure: Section 1 / Section 2

Time Signature: 2/4

Tempo: 61 (accelerando to 163)

Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: B Diminished; B Chromatic

As always, the primal suspect for unpleasantness is the tritone. and since Majora’s Mask puts emphasis on the middle portion of the ocarina scale (D F A B Upper D), we will get to see the tritone between F and B heavily featured on its songs. Like the ocarina tunes Link learned as a child in Ocarina of Time, it consist of a three note question motif repeated, easier to remember for players in order to play it quickly. However, this time around the song doesn’t have an answering phrase; it just keeps going up and up (soaring amirite?) in a messy flurry of notes that try to match the visuals and probably what Link feels when he is taken up violently to a different location, ending up dizzy and confused—the first few travels with this probably made him sick actually— in comparison, the Ocarina of Time warp felt as if he was been carried by the goddesses themselves in a fluffy cloud.

The Song of Soaring also has the honor of being the only tune that harmonizes the ocarina with itself, an instrument that is usually used to represent Link and that is always playing single lines—this mode of traveling has an inter-dimensional nature after all— The answer phrase consist of transposing the question motif up a semitone with each subsequent repetition, combining the unpleasantness of the tritone with the minor second; all this combined with the alarming connotations of a rising scale and music speeding up creates the full unpleasantness fest. Better to go on foot.

The song is ultimately trying to do a mickey mousing of the cutscene (mickey mousing is a term that comes from old school cartoon scoring, where the music tried to mimic the movements of characters, punctuating physical motions, actions and important events) In this case, Link is presumably moving in circles violently inside the magic tornado, so the harp and glockenspiel follow this action.

The low strings create even more confusion by going against the soaring motion of the melody, descending in parallel chromatic fashion also with diminished fifths intervals, only for the piece to end on a D dim7 chord.

The Song of Soaring completes the set of just three original ocarina tunes not meant to gain entrance to dungeons along with the Song of Healing and the Oath to Order (technically there are also new variations for the Song of Time).

For the Woodfall dungeon we already have the song that will awaken the Deku temple and this time around Kondo decided to create a music motif to mark the moment where Link gains the potential of entrance to a dungeon.

As a fun fact, the owl statues in the original Japanese release of the game didn’t have the possibility of saving the game, making Majora’s Mask an even more unforgiving quest for Far East gamers; so not a fun fact in Japan.