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| Concept art of the Lost Kingdom from The Art of Super Mario Odyssey. |
Something I admire about Nintendo’s approach to soundtracks is their composers' obvious inspiration from music traditions around the world. The best titles have an overall unifying musical identity, but will make use of heavy genre contrast to accentuate story elements or establish environments with distinct atmospheres. How well would the Twilight Princess’s Old Kakariko shooutout be remembered if it wasn’t accompanied by a Morricone-esque flute and sproingy Jew’s harp? We would never have seen Tom Brier's take on old Mario themes if not for Koji Kondo’s love affair with ragtime, and Wind Waker, a literal series sea change in style, wouldn't have felt quite as new if not for the Celtic-tinged main theme.
With all that said, I want to draw attention in this post to a small but very memorable use of traditional music: the Indonesian gamelan. Gamelan is both a style of music and the collective name for the instruments that are played, most of which are metal percussion, which gives the music its distinct, fluid timbre, though flutes, string instruments, and singing may also be elements of the music.
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| Gamelan performance in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2017. By Wikimedia user Pandjisaputra94, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. |
Gamelan is a cultural tradition on the islands of Java and Bali, but even within this relatively small geographic distribution there are many variations in style, instrumentation, and scale. There exists several different gamelan scales, including the prominent 5-note slendro and the 7-note pelog scales. The variations of scale all have one thing in common, however, which is the effect of unfamiliarity to Western ears. This unfamiliarity has been used to various ends in a few Nintendo scores.
Perhaps Nintendo’s first use of gamelan came in Super Mario 64, where frantic metallophones fall in under the melody of the Big Boo’s Haunt theme. The other components of the track aren’t exactly traditional, but the overall effect of the instrumentation is that the haunted house actually feels quite active and humming with energy.
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| Percussion instruments are unexpectedly scary in Big Boo's Haunt. |
The foreign sound of gamelan, Nintendo discovered, is useful for scoring strange and eerie environments – it sounds like chimes, but not anything in alignment with the rest of a Western-style score. Spooky-sounding gamelan appeared again in Twilight Princess, when a repeating gamelan clip was woven into the game’s generic Twilight theme (and consequently Zant’s theme). Here the gamelan is front and center for some part of the track, making it feel as though the presence of twilight has affected the fundamental reality of Hyrule.Eventually, Nintendo began to use gamelan for themes that were meant to sound more exotic than unnerving. Paper Mario: Sticker Star features a gamelan-driven theme for Chomp Ruins, a decaying temple deep in the jungle of World 5. While the gamelan mostly provides rhythm while flute and brass play melody, the flavor of the music -- propulsive, bright, and energetic -- is entirely set by the liquidy tone of the gamelan.
Kondo returned to gamelan for similar purposes in Super Mario Odyssey, in one of a handful of pieces he composed for the game (Naoto Kubo capably handles most of the score). The overcast, murky Lost Kingdom feels somewhat unfriendly, especially since Cappy is immediately stolen. Yet, after becoming familiar with the island’s gamelan theme, set in an unusual, loping 11/16 time signature, the place begins to feel special and warm, a mellow respite from the game’s big, character-filled other worlds. Most recently, gamelan shone in Echoes of Wisdom, where it features in the Faron Temple theme. The environment is humid and tropical, similar to the Lost Kingdom, and the theme complements it well.
These are the tracks that come to mind, but there may well be more that are unfamiliar to me. Let me know if there are others!