The Game Composer’s Blog

Game music, a matter of life and death.

TSN… #2: TSN use the Batman theme anymore!

And now for the second installment of Thou Shalt Not…

…use the Batman theme anymore anywhere!

It was fine in the first Batman movie. It sounded pretty cool. But since that movie came out in 1989, I have heard that theme coming from way too many movie and game soundtracks. What’s going on? I swear I’ve heard it on 70% of the aspiring game composers’ websites out there.

What is it exactly? Using the degrees of a minor scale: 1-2-3-6…-5-flat5:

Elfman’s Batman snippet:

Sometimes people change it a bit by doing 1-3-5-6…-5-flat5, but I’m gonna say that counts too.

Something about that little melody must have resonated in lots of people’s minds. The darn thing just won’t go away. I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire again a couple nights ago and it crept up there. I heard it Lord of the Rings too, for crying out loud. I was guilty of using it in a string quartet I wrote shortly after college. But as soon as I realized what it was, I threw that part out. I mean, it’s Batman.

And, no, according to the Ludus Sonitus Decretum from which I got these rules, just changing the harmony underneath this melody doesn’t count. It’s still too noticeable.

Please, all, let’s let this melody rest for a few decades.

July 3, 2008 Posted by | Thou Shalt Not | , , | 2 Comments

Tributes… yeah, they’re tributes!

In our profession, it’s inevitable that sometimes we’ll write something that sounds just like something else. Sometimes we haven’t heard the other piece and when someone points it out to us, we’re kind of peeved that someone else had the audacity to write that piece of brilliance first. How dare they! Other times, however, we know that what we’ve written sounds like something else but it’s just inevitable in our music that it has to sound that way. The flow of the piece just brought us to the point where we have to borrow a bit of someone else’s work. To do otherwise just may not make sense musically.

Well, playing Morrowind years ago I was always struck by one particular snippet of music that sounded just like a part in Jupiter from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. I finally sat down today and listened to both works side by side and they’re not only incredibly similar, but the snippets are in the same key and both come at very important points in the music, the ends of phrases. I think that’s pretty funny. Jeremy Soule is a terrific composer and I don’t want this to be a knock on him at all. We’ve all been there. But he has to know that he lifted this particular phrase from Jupiter. Have a listen:

Holsts’s Jupiter:

Morrowind Snippet (Call of Magic):

Again, not a knock on Jeremy Soule. This is just one of the more obvious examples of music… tributing… I’ve found in games. It goes on in music all the time. The Planets was generously… tributed… in Gladiator. John Williams has … tributed… many many composers in his work (check out Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella for a motherload of material Williams… gives tributes to).

Anyway, this topic came to mind yesterday as I was writing a piece of “Hollywood Egyptian” music. Something was sounding an awful lot like Philip Glass. So I changed it. A bit. It still kind of sounds like him. But not exactly. I hope.

If it does, well then… it’s a tribute.

June 18, 2008 Posted by | Music Nitty Gritty | , | Leave a Comment

   

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