Austin Wintory's Newest Theme is Also Simple, but Sophisticated (feat. @awintory)

[Music] so you may have seen a couple weeks ago i released a video dissecting some of the main themes that composer austin wintoury's written over the course of his career in game music attempting to pin down some of what defines wintery's style of writing in the context of the main theme of a game well shortly after posting the video austin got in touch with me and offered to do a little collaborative follow-up video austin wintry did the score to the pathless giant squids follow-up to 2016's abzu which came out last week i wanted to do a little addendum to my video and take a look at how the main theme of the pathless fits in with my analysis of some of wintery's other work as well as take the chance to ask him his thoughts on my thoughts on his work [Music] i mentioned in my other video some similarities between wintry's themes slower tempos minor keys and simple clear melodies the main theme from the pathless none have returned is no exception featuring a slow and simple melody in the key of g minor [Music] the melodies focus on a g minor sound particularly a g minor pentatonic sound and the use of the flat 7 as a way to resolve up to the root remind me a lot of journeys and the banner saga's main themes so austin why do you think you gravitate towards this kind of sound in your thematic writing so first off i just want to reiterate the comment that i left on your initial video and say thank you for doing that i was completely caught off guard by that video and i've had a bunch of people send it to me since who i think all independently know and love your channel as someone who also was a fan of your analyses it was very affecting and i probably learned a few things about myself um uh we'll get into that but i just wanted to make abundantly clear how touching that was that you would consider my work worth that level of scrutiny so regarding your specific question i have two answers for you first off i don't really know why i gravitate towards the sounds that i do obviously every composer is an amalgam of the influences that they've picked up through the course of their life from the music they've listened to and participated in and played in bands or you know played in orchestras or choirs all that kind of thing and of course the life experiences that they've had that affect their way of thinking their philosophy et cetera et cetera and how that all kind of gels together and becomes the foundation from which a composer writes is in a way anybody's guess there's too many variables to try to account for it all i think in my case the thing that a lot of the music i've always really admired has in common is that when it comes to thematic material that kind of underlying dna that forms the backbone of a larger work simplicity has always kind of arranged supreme i try to differentiate between what i call simplistic and simple where simplistic is kind of condescending in a sense simplistic is dumbing things down in one way or another whereas simple is hopefully eloquent and poetic it says a lot with very little and obviously the repertoire both of you know concert music and classical music and film music and video game music is loaded with examples of things that seem to be pregnant with potential and meaning while maybe only just being a few notes that has always been my goal any additional trends that you've picked up on beyond that honestly is just me i guess being me i'm not really deliberately doing anything consistent and in fact my goal is to always push myself somewhere i've i've never been and escape my my sort of native patterns that i might fall back on in the end if it's meaningful if it's something that is singable by someone in a way that they can kind of internalize then that's usually enough for me the second thing i wanted to say was that i would be remiss not to humbly suggest you expand the list of the melodies that you were looking at if you were trying to truly draw some trend lines because i've worked on quite a few projects where the fundamental musical needs really would not have been met by the kind of approach that you are describing when looking at things like the banner saga or journey or abzu etc just some examples would be a game like monaco or tooth and tail which were both made by a company called pocket watch games and creative director andy schatz those games are way more rambunctious and crazy and the thematic material i think has a lot less in common with these others another one kind of along those lines is a game called deformers made by ready at dawn which sadly was almost entirely unplayed by people but i absolutely loved working on and was a chance to against do something i felt like i had never really done so yes i'm sure there are these trends in my writing and i am doing some things purposefully but it also really depends on the need of the game and some of the games that you didn't mention have needs so different from those others that um you'll find the themes themselves also very very different that's a totally fair criticism i think to make a more interesting and cohesive video i try to spin a clean and coherent narrative or thought process behind a whole tune or soundtrack or composer's body of work and anything that doesn't fit cleanly into that narrative it's really easy to just leave out but even of the small sliver of your work that i did cover in my video i noticed how distinct each theme feels from each other in spite of their similarities i chalked this up to the huge variety of approaches to orchestration that you've taken throughout your career as well as some of the more subtle details in each theme's construction for the pathless the instrumentation is wildly different from any other game score i've ever listened to and i know that you made some very deliberate choices and instrumentation to achieve this unique effect do you intentionally try and keep your scores distinct from one another or is that just a natural consequence of working on projects that all have completely different styles and goals it's actually a little bit of both of those things sometimes i make choices just simply to kind of refresh my own personal palette i remember joking actually at the beginning of the banner saga that having just finished journey which is very dominated by strings and cello solos and that sort of thing that i wanted to write for brass and literally only brass to kind of cleanse the palette uh of strings now that that wasn't actually serious because i had independent reasons for wanting to do that but i do tend to move around just out of my own wanderlust uh that said fundamentally i won't do something unless the game really calls for it or justifies it somehow usually it's either narratively or from something intrinsic to the way the characters are written i just want to make sure that the music is telling their story faithfully and also in a way that feels truly proprietary to that game that feels like it's actually unique to whatever the developers are trying to achieve so then what was it about the pathless that inspired your approach to the orchestration it's tough to summarize that because the pathless evolved a lot i worked on it for about three and a half years and the score initially was a lot more traditionally orchestral even though a lot of the folk instruments and and unique soloists that are in the final recordings were present in some form or another early on but that said fundamentally speaking i really was just reacting to the story and the world that matt nava was creating matt's the creative director at giant squid and and likewise of abzu and he had been the art director before that for that game company on journey and flower and so part of it is that he and i have developed a kind of intuitive second hand with each other i just feel like i get his games and i think he understands where i'm coming from musically so to a certain degree the choices that i make are coming from a kind of almost uncommunicated sixth sense that he and i share on top of that this game has this beautiful kind of playable mythology quality as if you're walking through the lived experience of a hero that later would be immortalized in a constellation and passed down through you know oral traditions around campfires there's something very universal and mythic about the gameplay and about the story being told and i wanted to make sure that the music had that quality something rustic and connected to people you know the orchestra for all its splendor and beauty has a tendency to also feel a bit detached and and larger than life i wanted this to feel more like a folk tradition and once i kind of clued into that it just became a matter of experimenting until i ran out of time looking at some of your main themes all side by side i started to see a common structure emerge an initial melodic phrase will set up an idea then the following phrase will take that idea and then move it into a different direction none have returned is structured a little bit differently from the other themes i looked at in my video you have this initial two-bar melodic phrase then you answer it with the following two bar phrase that is obviously connected to the first by the rhythm and general contour of the line [Music] the next four bars take this idea from the third bar of the theme this walk up the g minor pentatonic scale in the specific rhythm and move it down for each of these three consecutive single bar phrases i love the way the two bar phrases give way into one bar phrases it feels like the theme is speeding up or building intensity as it goes along [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] my question for you austin is how much do you think about the structure of a piece of music when writing so i want to differentiate structure of a score and structure of a theme everything that you just said was really fascinating but i honestly wouldn't say that i consciously do any of what you just said i think it's perhaps fair to come up with all of those explanations and analyses after the fact especially as a sort of impartial observer fair game but i don't think to myself while writing okay i want to make sure that there's a parallelism between the first two phrases etc etc etc i was trying to think of an analogy to explain it and the off the cuff this is imperfect but what i thought of was imagine a painter who is setting out to create a landscape so let's start by making a tree in the center of the image well the development of that tree is going to immediately have implications and consequences for the rest of the piece so if the tree dominates the center of the canvas and there's a lot of detail and a lot of structure and a lot of color that's going to influence how the painter then goes about filling in the landscape itself what's going to be in the sky are there going to be other trees you know in the distance to maybe help balance the composition is it more impressionistic etc etc etc all of these considerations where as soon as you put that tree in there the rest is gonna develop in relationship to it so when i'm writing a theme often if i find a sort of hook that i like or some even a single interval that feels right it's now guiding everything that comes after it so i'm not starting with this top-down series of dictates about how it ought to be it's just once you crack open a door everything you do is going to be in subsequent hallways and doorways beyond that initial door it's it's really not development of you know the floor plan of the building from the from the bottom up how was that for like five mixed metaphors um but i said i want to differentiate between scores and themes because when i think about structure of a full score and sort of how a theme will get used and doled out and evolve that i think about a ton you know to me it's the difference between beethoven coming up with you know and crafting those first initial four notes to to become the basis of the motive versus exploring how to actually develop that in the subsequent 10 minute movement and fully four movement symphony uh the the latter i i absolutely spend a lot of time thinking about that is so interesting if i had to guess i think a very very small number of composers if any uh take a very analytical approach to their music when writing but it's really interesting to me to hear people talk about how they balance their kind of inspired unbridled creative output with a more structured sense of the craft of putting together you know a piece of music or something like that that being said one thing that the pathless theme does that i haven't noticed in any of your other themes is repeating notes the kind of hook of the theme in my mind is this figure right at the beginning with three b-flats in a row and i think these three notes are why i find this melody getting stuck in my head a lot when writing a theme what specifically are you thinking about when it comes to the musical characteristics that a theme might have honestly this answer might seem very simple but i really am just trying to ask myself how does this make me feel there is a part of me that is saying how can i develop this is there a hook or recognizable kind of architecture that will allow me to develop this where you can still hear that that is the theme as the foundation of the development in other words if something was just utterly unmemorable or untraceable you wouldn't hear it as it starts to evolve everything would just sound like new material you wouldn't differentiate variations on an old idea from the arrival of a new one so i think about that but that even that is rather instinctive because i basically just develop an idea and then i sing it to myself i walk around the streets outside my studio for a few days and sometimes hum things to myself a lot and that sort of thing and i just see will this hold up can i play with it and flip it upside down and and vary it and slow it down and speed it up and do all of those things that very often occur in melodic development and still feel like i can trace it so the repeating note thing versus not big leaps wide intervals or not etc etc honestly it is just always about what feels right here and now for this project at this time in my life it's worth mentioning that five years from now i may have a very different sensibility as we all just constantly evolve austin thank you so much for doing this we're gonna wrap this up soon but first i'd love to know a little bit about the process of writing a piece of music and then actually getting it into the game i think a lot of people out there can write some music and love the idea of writing music for games but the actual steps in between sitting alone at your piano writing and playing a game with a fully orchestrated and implemented soundtrack that might seem a little mysterious well seriously thank you again i am i am just blown away um i get questions a lot about the process about the techniques uh if you go to my youtube channel you'll see i like to share a lot of behind the scenes kind of content we've been doing a series called as noted where we share the transcriptions and final conductor scores and things like that of a lot of queues especially ones that seem to be consistently requested but to the specific question of the process that a cue can take from literal blank page all the way to the finished product that you would hear in the game i i've actually just put the finishing touches on a video that you can see right now by going to my channel that documents every single step every member of my team that i work with on a piece especially one involving orchestral recordings i have everybody document their own process and we show in pretty great detail everything that it takes so if that's of interest i hope folks can check it out but either way thank you again so much for having me and for in a way validating a lifetime of trying to make sense out of music and games and creativity and all that and and hoping that something sensible and meaningful comes out of it i've seen the video and it is incredibly interesting you guys should all definitely go check it out now i hope you'll forgive me for being a little indulgent but for the last question i'd love to know what did you think watching my analysis of your writing was there anything i said that surprised you where in the video was i totally off base and was there anything that i touched on that you had deliberately made part of your writing style honestly i can only just say that the whole thing was kind of surreal you know i've been doing this now for the better part of 15 years and yet i still have this kind of knee-jerk shock when anybody seems to care or pay that much attention to what i'm doing um i just don't take it for granted i don't feel like i am owed that or deserved that or anything like that i really just try to do my job work with these you know amazing creative developers and filmmakers and orchestras and theater companies and all that kind of thing that have been grateful to collaborate with and and just really try to give them all that it is that i have to offer and sometimes everything that i do is fundamentally instinctual of course built on you know my constant drive to to hone my technique and just become a better composer foundationally but in other words it sometimes is a purely unintellectual process and then sometimes it's a very intellectual process where we spend a lot of time thinking about ways in which music can you know reflect literary themes and there might be subtle illusions to you know prior works or whatever it really is just so difficult to summarize that's part of what i love about this career is every project is kind of its own little adventure that has its own rules its own terms for success versus failure all that kind of thing i absolutely love it i feel insanely grateful to get to do this so no there isn't anything actually that i would say is especially uh wrong or honestly especially right it was a kind of level-headed uh take on things that are sometimes conscious and sometimes not i i think you did a pretty amazing thing i could only restate the earlier response that i had which was that there are a handful of games and even films that if you go they would probably shake up your formula a little bit because they just had their own rules that i was establishing for them but that doesn't invalidate the argument that you made i think it's it's it was interesting it was like i said it was actually more surreal than anything else well that's all i've got to say for now thank you so much austin for agreeing to come and share your thoughts like this i spend a lot of time trying to get inside composers heads by looking at their music and it's not often that i get to actually ask a composer so what's in your head so this has been really fun for me i can't wait to pick up the path list and i'm sure all of you watching feel the same way i hope you guys enjoyed this as much as i did thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 47,314

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Id: OC24V2N8TAU

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020