Inside The Score – The Legend of Zelda:Ocarina of Time Original Soundtrack – Enter Ganondorf

Because just one leitmotif wasn’t enough for this villain

Introduction

You create your first save file for the game and you’re eager to embark on this epic quest. All the lights and sound go off; the slow crawl of the text in a shakespearian voice, along with the silence, gets across the point that this is a different kind of Zelda; one that wants to be taken as a contemplative and artistic work. The very first visuals are in a 2D perspective, reminding us of the history of the series. Our protagonist, Link, is having some kind of nightmare; it seems this is the first Link that has premonitions. The rain, the chains on the bridge, the galloping of horses, the cinematography; all this comes together into a kaleidoscopic cacophony. Disorienting us and putting us directly inside the nightmare, and then….boom.

The full Nintendo 64 MIDI orchestra blast our ears; over are the days when silence in games was bounded to technical constraints and not to an artistic choice. And here it is silence, one of the biggest sonic allies throughout Ocarina of Time, the partner in crime for the malevolent piece that accompanies the game big baddie. It is a piece that will be used to accentuate the narrative beats involving evilness going berserk, when the mask fails off. There will be four instances where this piece is played, all showing unexpected encounters with the king of thieves.

This was the first time that the pig demon known as Ganon is shown in his humanoid form, granting even more realism to the Zelda series and giving a proper background and culture to Link’s foe; I guess you could say that he was humanized here, literally and metaphorically. We will go deeper into the Gerudo culture at a later date but suffice to say for now that his olive dark skin turned greenish by his demonic nature, the amber eyes and the sharp, hook shaped nose play around with tropes of the Middle Easterner foreigner coming from the desert to conquer European lands.

Besides the silence there is nothing innovative about this short cue that screams danger; Koji Kondo decided to play it as straightforward as possible to get the point across that this man is evil and dangerous. The cue is an unapologetically Hollywood or morning cartoon inspired villain leitmotiv in its most classic definition. A leitmotif is a recurring piece of music (or at least melody) that represents a character, action, or theme.

A well-established technique used in almost every medium that involves music and story, the leitmotif technique in its modern conception was invented by opera composer Richard Wagner (basically the guy who invented Lord of the Rings-style music) in the second half of the 19th Century.

The particular tone Kondo is summoning here is nothing more than the Psycho-inspired danger music. The power of the Bernard Herrmann-penned score for the influential movie Psycho (1960) has now been diluted by countless parodies, skits and cartoons throughout the years, but in its original apparition it was nothing less than downright terrifying.

High pitched Instruments playing dissonant intervals is the way to go for the composer wanting to build up tension instantaneously, and who were the masters of dissonance if not 20th century modernists like Igor Stravinsky. One of the most famous works of modern classical music serves as the influence for the kind of foreboding style that would make its way to incidental music:

The usual suspects for the origin of dissonance from a musical point of view are the minor 2nd interval and the diminished 5th interval. You can create a horror film score right now by going to a piano and play as many of these two intervals without caring for a particular scale (bonus points if you do it in the higher or lower registers!)

The name diabolus in musica has been applied to the diminished fifth interval– alternatively called the tritone– from at least the early 18th century (there is a widespread myth that the Catholic Church “banned” this interval from music during the middle ages, but in reality they just pointed out that it was dissonant). Now let’s see how Koji plays with this old tradition.

Music Analysis

This is one of the themes from Ocarina of Time that is not handcuffed by the considerations of video game music; it can go full Hollywood with an uncomplicated orchestral leitmotif to sound the alarm –it also serves as a motif and inspiration for the Ganondorf’s Battle theme near the end of the game.

As you can see from the table above, this is a Harmony based piece; just huge blocks of chords that don’t care about the tune that much. The piccolo gets to be the melody owing to it being the highest voice. Therefore, this is a piece which we must unpack with that in mind; as always we must ask ‘what is the core of the piece?’ The basic elements which would preserve its identity? The most likely candidate are the high strings:

These strings were most likely the starting point for Kondo. What chords are they playing and why? The notes that form the first chord are: C Gb B. The subsequent chords conserve the same relation between notes

An expert on the matter would look at this set of notes and conclude that this three are part of a D 7/13 chord or something even weirder to impress you; and he would be right. But would that information really be useful to unpack the “function” behind the music and the composer intentions? Not really. You can go play that chord on an instrument and it will not feel like the piece. A simpler approach dispels our path.

It’s almost guaranteed that Kondo chose these chords to benefit from those grisly little diminished fifths, and minor seconds. For all intents and purposes, the piece would keep its essence as long as we preserve the tritone, so why not ditch the B and analyze the chord as a C♭5; a diminished chord. Nothing else really matters besides the root and fifth degree when it comes to the bedrock –that’s why you can play almost any song with just the perfect fifths as a foundation and it will sound like the song (hey, punks often do that!)– The only thing Kondo did was to use the two evil intervals we discussed in the introduction: the diminished fifth (C-Gb) and the minor 2nd (C-B)

With this being said, the skeleton of the cue; the chord progression, becomes:

C ♭5 / C ♭5 – Bb ♭5 – C ♭5 / Eb ♭5 / D ♭5

No need for those 9ths 13ths, Napolitan, dystopian…. Just one interval is enough. What’s that? you want to see the piece naked?

That’s it, the song is already there; all else you will hear are distractions and ornamentation. With the head and the body already apparent (melody and harmony), now you just have to put clothes on it. After getting to this point, as a composer your work just becomes to fatten up the tracks: stacking notes, doubling pitches and adding texture. For now it’s too skinny, let’s add the low harmony, courtesy of the low strings and the tuba playing the same notes together –we can’t really say that this piece has accompaniment since all the notes follow the rhythm of the melody.

The low harmony is not playing the same notes as the melody, mind you, the low instruments are playing the melody a minor 2nd above the melody (in a lower register, of course); dissonances everywhere!

The horns add the missing puzzle piece, the Eb note that confirms that these are diminished chords we are dealing with. The trombones–sounding in their MIDI version more like trumpets– limit themselves to reinforcing the upper harmony, playing perfect fourths (another interval considered dissonant, that will be closely associated with Ganondorf)

Finally, a piece like this can’t be left without percussion to complete the startling effect. The timpani, though a pitched instrument, have a more ornamental function inside this piece; the soundtrack shows its age with its amusing attempt at mimicking a timpani roll for the climatic end, and the clash cymbal… well, the clash cymbal is exciting! And it punctuates endings

Ganondorf is one of a handful of characters from Ocarina of Time that gets its own theme. This, naturally, befits his importance in the narrative. Another character to also get a theme is the guardian of the forest, the one that has been on the earth since ancient times; the Great Deku Tree.

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