Hi, I’m back! I’m pretty excited about today’s topics so I’m just going to go into this pretty quickly:

Last time I gave a short intro to Cave Story and video game music in general, introduced the idea of counterpoint, and then ended with an attempt to explain cross-relations with a painting analogy. To quickly reiterate that idea, let’s go straight into another track on the OST, “Geothermal.” The piece is in D Minor (actually it’s more like in limbo between D minor and F major, but that’s not important right now)–this doesn’t have to mean anything to you, other than, similarly with any other key, D Minor has a certain subset of notes within the 12-note palette that distinguish D Minor from all the other 23 keys. Using the example from last time, let’s say D Minor uses mostly bluish colors, with some green and purple for dissonance. A cross-relation, which I described as an “invasion by a foreign note,” would be like a small orange dot against the blue backdrop. Let’s see where this appears in “Geothermal.”

Again, I’ll go through this in detail:

0:01–The intro sets the harmonic backdrop for the piece–most of the song actually just goes back and forth between these 2 chords introduced here. You can hear the chord change at 0:05 and it changing back at 0:10.

0:18–Melody comes in! Take note of what 0:23 sounds like. The first time you hear this part of the melody, it is in line with the other parts of the music (the harmonic backing). Blue on blue.

0:36–The melody repeats. In a tradition dating back as far as written music goes (and probably even before that), the second time you hear a melody has to be different from the first in some sort of way. The “different thing” that happens here is at 0:40.

Do you hear the difference between 0:23 and 0:40? There should be something “off” about what happens at 0:40. What you are hearing is the cross-relation! It’s the orange dot against the blue backdrop. Another way to think of it is: if someone were playing this music live, what happens at 0:40 might be perceived as a mistake. Cross-relations sound “off” because they ARE, in a way, “wrong notes.” They’re not part of the subset that’s dictated by the key of the piece (D Minor). Chopin wrote an Etude that played with this concept (and it was then aptly nicknamed the “Wrong Note” Etude):

Isn’t that awesome?! What a special and interesting way to vary the second repetition of the melody! This is not something you usually see when you see music makers creating interest in the 2nd repetition of a melody. The typical ways of creating variation come in the form of:

drums (beginning vs 0:22):

added instrumentation (beginning vs 1:10):

or (more commonly in classical music) harmonic variation (beginning vs 0:19).

And of course people often vary the melody itself (but I excluded that because it’s not an exact repetition of the melody anymore, is it?). But what Pixel does here with the use of dissonance is really pretty rare in music today.

Of course, he doesn’t do it just once! Let’s look at one of my favorite tracks from the Cave Story OST, “Labyrinth Fight.”

0:01–Similar to the other songs we’ve looked at so far, it starts by introducing the harmonic framework of the song. However, here we must recognize a crucial difference–in the “Geothermal” example, the introductory passage is a repeating pattern. It anchors around a few notes that make up a chord (which is why I noted above that there are only 2 chords, and that they change back and forth between each other). Another way to say this is that you could play all the notes in that passage simultaneously and it would create the chord you want. This is NOT the case here. The introductory passage in Labyrinth Fight is not a repeating pattern–it’s a melody of its own! It’s the bassline of the song, which means that while it does SUGGEST the harmonic structure of the song, in this case, it’s melodic as well.

0:13–The melody comes in! But the bassline is melodic as well–what does that imply? Where is the “harmonic backing” we usually have? Thinking back to what I said in the last post, it means that, yes, this is a contrapuntal piece! The bassline and the melody are actually both “melodies” in that they’re interesting on their own, and they have to combine and work together to create the harmonic progression. There is no instrument that acts purely as a “harmonic backing” in this piece.

When the melody first comes in at 0:13, notice that the bassline, in comparison to how it sounds in the intro, becomes much more subdued, and much more “bassy.” If you’re on laptop speakers, chances are you can’t even hear it.

Think of it as the bassline coming in first with his big melodic introduction, then fading away to allow the upper melody (because the bassline is the lower melody, right?) to come in and make HIS big melodic introduction. After they’ve both introduced themselves, both sing at full volume, together (this is at 0:24, the 2nd time we hear the upper melody).

Let’s look now at the first time the upper melody comes in. Right away, right before 0:15, there should be something “off” about the interaction of the two melodies. You may have to listen kind of hard, since the bassline is pretty quiet. If it goes by you pretty easily, that’s fine. I think that there’s not meant to be a harsh or noticeable “offness” quality to it. But keep that passage in your mind. Remember how in “Geothermal,” the second iteration of the melody was accompanied with a cross-relation? Let’s hear what happens the second time the (upper) melody is played in this piece. Listen carefully to what happens at 0:25–it may been hard to hear at 0:15, but you should be able to hear something clearly “off” at 0:25. It’s clearer because the bassline is playing at full volume this time! How awesome that he manages to achieve the same effect of a “different repeat of the same melody” without even CHANGING THE NOTES this time!

So what exactly is “off” about 0:25? It should be clear at this point that this is another cross-relation. It sounds like a “wrong” note, something is “off,” it must be a cross-relation.

But it’s not.

What? Think back to how I even started introducing the idea of a cross-relation. I had to introduce the concept of a “key,” and I made an analogy about how a cross-relation is like an orange dot on a blue painting. In “Geothermal,” we looked at a musical example of how that “orange” note invaded our “blue” harmonic backing.

Now think back to what happens at 0:25 in “Labyrinth Fight.” If we were to assign “orange” and “blue” to the musical events happening here, which would be orange? Blue?

As I mentioned before, the difference between “Geothermal” and “Labyrinth Fight” is that one is your classic “melody vs harmonic backing” and that the other is “two melodies in counterpoint.” In “Geothermal,” it’s easy to assign orange to the “off” note in the melody, and the blue background to the harmony. But when you have two melodies in counterpoint, we cannot say EITHER is “the harmony” or “the melody.” They’re equally both! The “orange dot on blue” analogy cannot APPLY to counterpoint, because we’re talking about an entirely different system of writing music!

What exactly is going on, then? The best way to describe what’s going on here (because these things are rarely black and white) is bitonality. Breaking that word down, bi meaning two, tonal meaning “harmonic areas,” what bitonality essentially is is the interaction of two musical objects, each in a DIFFERENT key. Typically in bitonal music, the two keys that are juxtaposed are usually similar. In “Labyrinth Fight,” the bassline mostly contains notes from G Minor, while the upper melody is in G Major. What this allows for is what you hear in “Labyrinth Fight”: sections of consonant harmony (because G Major and G Minor have many notes in common), with sections of “offness” (where G Major and G Minor clash). If we use a color analogy, we can say, for example, that “G Major” is made up of reds and oranges. “G Minor” can be made up of reds and purples. Where the reds coincide, there are no problems–but occasionally purple and orange will be juxtaposed, and that’s what we hear at 0:25.

It takes some knowledge of musical history and musical convention to fully appreciate it, but bitonality in music other than 20th century classical music is RARE. The fact that this kind of stuff showed up in a video game soundtrack is actually really amazing to me. It’s not easy to pull off well! Usually, taking two melodies from different keys and putting them together is cause for disaster. Cave Story pulls it off like no other.

-tmc

NEXT TIME: I’m gonna do some analysis on new, non-game music! So pretty much anything goes! Let me know if you have any suggestions or stuff specifically you’d like to hear about. 🙂

BONUS: AWESOME bitonal piano music from 20th century composer Darius Milhaud: Sorocabo from “Saudades do Brazil”