From the University of Nagoya to the history of popular music thanks to the Mario and Zelda sagas
There are many factors that contribute to a musician going down in history, either as an interpreter or as a composer. It is possible to become a virtuoso on an instrument and be remembered for it for years, but it is much more normal that the names that become immortal are those of those minds that produced works that went beyond the limits of their time. It is a very high goal that few people manage to achieve, especially since there are several very complicated characteristics that can be verified in the great names of musical history. On the one hand, an unusual melodic inventiveness is necessary, since it is the melody that almost always makes a certain work immortal for those who listen to it. Likewise, it is necessary that the aspiring immortal works with a language that is novel to a certain extent, in which things are still to be consolidated. Both facets can be verified in the work of The Beatles, Mozart or Chopin, artists from very different times and genres that, however, have reached that significance. It is also the case, now that the subject begins to have interest (and the musicians can begin to say it), by the Japanese Koji Kondo, the author behind the music of the Super Mario Bros and Zelda sagas.
The story of Koji Kondo (Nagoya, 1961) is not entirely strange among Japanese video game composers regarding the heterodox nature of their education as a musician. His training is far from self-taught since he studied music at the university, but his higher studies consisted more of an approach to various audiovisual arts, rather than a true specialization in composition. Kondo, yes, he had all his life with music in tow thanks to the Yamaha Electone and several groups in which he played as a teenager, in addition to being a regular of the first arcade games. With these specific, yet frequent wigs, it is obvious that he could not even think that his works would acquire importance until they were heard decades (and probably centuries) later, transformed into a decisive part of an emerging musical folklore, but the the fact is that this has happened. A few years ago, a series of documentaries produced by the Red Bull Music Academy wondered if the composers of the Japanese video game could be the most listened to in the history of their country outside its borders, a possibility much more than real. From this perspective, the music of Koji Kondo already takes on an important role: we are talking about a composer who has carried out his career in the right place and at the right time when something wonderful was going to happen, with the luck and talent necessary to repeat the feat a few times. His work is enormous and of a high level of quality in the middle, but an approach to his career can be understood through three of his moments.
Super Mario Bros
By chance, Nintendo, in full expansion after the famous crash in 1983, began to need specialized composers, so a job offer from the company ended up at the University of Nagoya. Young Kondo replied to that offer (the only one he applied for) since the sound of video games had always been an attractive field for him. Decades after that job offer, Koji Kondo's name appears as a supervisor or music advisor in many Nintendo games, some of his songs will never stop being heard, and certain melodies from his imagination have come to be in the very same system menus for Nintendo consoles. But all this would not have happened without his collaboration, in a very special moment, with another of the greats of video games: Shigeru Miyamoto.
Koji Kondo has sometimes detailed how his collaboration with Miyamoto was in the game that consolidated Nintendo's dominance. The interviews in which he has detailed it speak of a work that went far beyond what we have read about other composers of the time. It is a topic from which doctoral theses could emerge, but the point is that these six very short pieces, which were repeated in a loop because the Nintendo NES could not stop, influenced the panorama of video game music almost as much as the game itself did it over all the medium. The piece we know as Ground Theme, the "Super Mario theme", is now a melody that has been arranged for all kinds of instruments, in innumerable formations and with the most absurd purposes, and there are studies that place it among the best known … of the entire history of music. As a soundtrack adapted to a medium, this music has been analyzed in books as interesting as that of Andrew Schartmann, an in-depth musicological study devoted exclusively to these six pieces, but those who do not wish to delve so deeply would do well by staying with other aspects. .
In this music, Kondo's main facet as a composer stands out, the most outstanding feature of his style: his impressive melodic fantasy. An unusual creativity, capable of getting incredible reactions to people born in four different decades with very few wickerwork. A few examples: the first three notes of the Underworld Theme are enough for millions of people to imagine themselves entering a cave through a pipe; a simple waltz represents us diving among the chubby fishes … and thus to infinity according to the experience of each one. None of this is achieved without the melodic talent of a character capable of bypassing the limitations to which video game music was condemned in 1983, which were many. In the case of the pioneers, and this applies very directly to that of Kondo, these conditions were also a great opportunity: that of saying much with very little.
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Along with the Mario games, to which Kondo continued to put music throughout the Nes and Snes era with surprising moments in each of them, the melodies of the Zelda saga were always the other field of action of a Koji Kondo that has already did not leave the baton at Nintendo. With Zelda, we are talking about a saga in which musical instruments and melodies have played a prominent role already within the game itself, so the musical aspect has always been something very defining in Link's adventures. A response from Kondo himself in an interview for Wired offers us a great opportunity to delve into the musical essence of the world of Hyrule.
“… With Zelda, I was trying to reinforce the atmosphere of the surroundings and locations. Mario's music is more or less like popular music, but Zelda is more like… music that you haven't heard before. So I tried to incorporate other types of music to create an environment that looks like another world. "
The next momentous moment for Kondo's music is surely that of the last OST he composed entirely, that of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Before listening carefully, it is advisable to keep track of its melodies. It is easily verifiable that many of them come from A Link to the Past or even from the first Zelda for the NES, but this idea of music from another world was finally achieved in more advanced hardware, such as that of the Nintendo 64. Despite this, it must be remembered that it was a machine that still contained its limitations for musical composition, even compared to the systems of its time. The point is that in Ocarina of Time the main theme of Zelda does not sound (at least as its own entity), but melodies as beautiful in their simplicity as Kakariko Village, or that relaxing prodigy that remembers Bach and is called Great Fairy´s Fountain. But the Super Nintendo, although it is a machine with a sensational sound chip, was still not enough for that to produce that music that should take us completely to another place.
The world of music video game composition had changed a lot in 1998, but Nintendo 64 didn't have the CD resource that so many things had changed for composers. With these limitations, it is much more surprising to find music as evocative as that of Ocarina of Time. Two elements worked the miracle in our opinion: the colorful orchestral of some songs such as Deku Tree or Water Temple, with strings and ocarinas that already sound like a musical instrument but still cannot make us forget that they come from a chip, and that melodic inventiveness of a Kondo determined to give the best of himself in a game with a very different interactivity than his first projects. Kondo's genius shone again when we heard a bird singing at dawn, and then accompanied us through the field throughout the day on a subject as fascinating as Hyrule Field. A defining composition, by the way, of another characteristic for which Kondo's music is very celebrated: that of not attacking the nerves of the player when it is necessary to repeat it for a long time. The ideal example of why Zelda is where she is on a musical level. And there are a few more.
The sound of Nintendo
The striking third stage of Kondo's career is already, at least a priori, somewhat further removed from music composition, but it surely has much more influence on what it sounds like in today's Nintendo video games. Such a thing projects his figure into a future that we cannot yet reach with his ears and has direct repercussions on the entire world of video games for a reason difficult to discuss: among the greats, Nintendo is the company with a more distinctive sound identity, recognizable in very different titles in almost everything else. Become a legend thanks to his tremendous track record with Mario and Link, Kondo has taken on the role of music supervisor for almost every game that has come out of Nintendo since the GameCube era. Whether or not his presence is reflected in the credits, that melodic inventiveness of charming musical motifs that say it all with very little is present even in the system sounds of the Wii U, and much of its themes are still arranged (sometimes with a quality out of the ordinary, as has happened in Link's Awakening for Switch) in new Nintendo games.
In some way, the Koji Kondo of the latest Nintendo consoles is essential when it comes to shaping the sound of the current Nintendo, which has very notable soundtracks in which he has also participated as a composer, already within a team. It is again the plumber saga with Super Mario Galaxy that defines this new Nintendo as few in sound. The idea of an orchestral music surely was always in the heads of Miyamoto and Kondo, but this time the possibility really existed and we have come to see it on video in several clips that include the live recording sessions. This opened the doors to a whole musical world that improved the experience of one of the biggest surprises of Nintendo in its entire history, and an interview from 2010 hints at this new role of Kondo as a reference, since he performed it together with one of the New Nintendo composers, Mahito Yokota, already a member of a large team comprising instrumentalists, arrangers and orchestration specialists.
“Although 22 years have passed and the hardware has improved, our goal of developing music for games has always been the same: to create sound that allows people to have more fun playing the game. This time we made orchestrated music because we wanted the players to feel the magnificence of the universe in the game. "
People like Yokota, who surely grew up listening to the music of Kondo on the first Nintendo systems, now continue their legacy by collaborating with the myth itself on soundtracks as superb as those of the two Galaxy or Mario Odyssey. We, players and musician-players who have known the work of Kondo himself in his natural habitat, can only discover ourselves before a true master of tonality and concretion. One who was involved in several decisive moments in the history of Japanese video games, but who also had the talent necessary to become an inseparable part of the set that took them to the top. It is very tempting, with characters of this lineage, to be carried away by enthusiasm, but the qualification of "Mozart of music for video games" is probably not exaggerated to define Kondo, author of works that mark the dividing lines in the evolution of this type of music. Melodies that will be interpreted, analyzed and, above all, enjoyed, for as long as video games exist.
