Wowser... I'm really falling behind in my promise to update the site daily, aren't I? At least I'm updating it more than I was in August. So, that's good, anyway.
So, on to today's entry. This one's for the music theorists and/or fans of classical music who are also videogame otaku. Not many of you, but I'm sure there's at least two (including me).
Have you ever been listening to a song in the soundtrack of a videogame and realised, "hey, I've heard that before!", and not because you've played that game before?
Well, such a thing dawned on me when I was playing Ocarina of Time on my Legend of Zelda collector's disc for GameCube. I had gotten to the bit where Sheik appears and teaches Link the Bolero of Fire -- you know how Sheik has a particular theme song? Well, a bit of Sheik's theme sounds very much like the first movement of Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky. Here's a bit of it (it's really compressed, so it'll sound rather tinny)...
Pictures at an Exhibition, First Movement
Please note that I had no hand in the production of this file.
Anyway, listening to that, can you hear Sheik's Theme in there?
That's not the only time Koji Kondo has borrowed from Modest Mussorgsky, either. In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a bit of Night on Bald Mountain can be heard during Link's battle with Gohma in Dragon Roost Cavern. I think Koji Kondo's work has really been influenced by Mussorgsky... strange, because Modest Mussorgsky was the most ill-respected composer of his time. Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky said of Mussorgsky, "In talent, he is perhaps superior...but his nature is narrow-minded."
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov said of Mussorgsky's manuscripts, "They were defective, teeming with clumsy, disconnected harmonies...and bad scoring. What is needed is an edition...suitable for...those who wish to admire Mussorgsky's genius, not to study his...sins against art."
In particular, these two composers took many of Mussorgsky's works and, essentially, re-composed them in their own styles -- an act which, today, would be considered blatant infringement of copyright.
Also, in the category of videogame composers who borrow from the masters, Nobuo Uematsu's Super Smash Bros. Brawl Theme contains a great deal of a particular piece written by Ludwig von Beethoven, though, sadly, I can't remember the title.
Anyway, videogames aren't the only places where you can find bits of classical music. John Williams's Jaws theme is an excellent example. It's, basically, the first four measures of the fourth movement of Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony.
The Inspector Gadget theme is mostly just a sped-up rendition of Edward Elgar's Hall of the Mountain King from his musical re-telling of the folk tale, Peer Gynt.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's Memory from the musical, Cats, contains a bit of Remo Giazotto's Adagio in G Minor (supposedly written by the Baroque composer, Tomaso Albinoni, but that's a different blog entry).
The new theme song to Judge Judy is a remix of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
So, to those who think that the "longhair music" is finally dead -- on the contrary. It lives on in one form or another in popular culture.
