The Song that Changed my Life

so I wish the title of this video wasn't its clickbait II as it was but hopefully in the end it'll all make sense okay so one thing you're going to need to know is that I love video games and video game music and I've wanted to write music for video games since forever now don't get me wrong I love music in film and in TV too but video games kind of do it for me okay so I wanted to write music for video games so badly that I went out I got a bachelor's degree in music uh so while I was getting my degree I constantly have people coming up and telling me that I didn't really need to get a degree to write music for video games which if you stick around to the end of the video you're gonna find out is kind of true for all the wrong reasons and I got made fun of for wanting to bring a degree to video game music like whenever I meet a new professor or a new student they'd all ask the same standard questions so what made you choose music and I tell them I wanted to write music for video games and a lot of times they laugh it off and in one really awkward instance they responded with no really why music but I'm getting off topic so one day I'm sitting in my music theory class and the piece were going over is a song called Darrell Koenig by Schubert and my entire outlook on music and my life just changed forever so Schubert was an Austrian dude in the early 19th century who wrote a bunch of leader which is German for song he was 19 when he wrote this piece although he didn't write the text so Darrell Koenig is this poem originally written by johann wolfgang von goethe about a father and son riding through the woods at night trying to get home but every so often the son sees a figure in the woods all creepy-like and every time son sees this figure he turns to his dentist's dad there's something in the woods the earl Koenig is coming to get me I should have explained so Earl Koenig is German for kinda like elf King and remember this is all German folklore so when you hear elf don't think Legolas think more like gizmo after you feed him after midnight so kid sees elf king of the woods tells his dad dad's like nah ston we're fine relax don't worry about it it's just the mist but the kid keeps seeing this mysterious elf King in the woods who keeps calling out to the kid with creepy Jared from Subway [ __ ] like we got candy and hookers and whatever just get my van so after a little while the dad starts getting more and more nervous about his son and rushes to get home faster all the while the son keeps telling his dad about this figure in the woods but they make it home and as the Father breathes a sigh of relief he looks down to find his son dead in his arms spooky okay but Schubert looked at this and thought hang on I think we can do better so the piece that he wrote using this poem as the lyrics is for solo male voice and piano accompaniment and the first thing you're going to notice when you listen to this piece is that the right hand of the piano has this constant triplet motion which take my word for it makes it super hard to play but it imitates the hooves of a horse galloping through the woods and this pattern only stops when one and two things happen up first whenever the Earl king is calling out to the Sun and trying to mesmerize them which almost makes it feel like the elf king is trying to like pull the son away from reality and second when the father and son arrive at home at the end of the piece not only imitating how the horse is now stopped moving but it also adds to the dramatic effect of the son's death now on the volkl side of things Schubert looked at the poem and saw that there were four distinct characters the narrator the father son and the Earl Connick were the off King so as a means of making it obvious which voice was speaking he put each one in a different range so whenever you listen to the son speaking it's in the upper register to sound more like a young boy while the father's voice is always in the lower register to represent maturity it's kind of the same effect that Robin Williams created when he was doing improv on stage hey I didn't get to the mint money what's really interesting is when you break open the theory of this piece okay so just a brief music theory lesson I just want to lose anyone so there are twelve key signatures think of them as the twelve languages of music and each language has a light side and a dark side the light side of the language we call major and a lot of people in the Western world have grown to associate the sound of major key signature is sounding happy and vice-versa for minor key signatures sounding set and these languages are listed in this circular chart we call the circle of fifths don't worry about all these names just know that this stuff exists okay now you can see which key signatures relate to others based on how close they are to each other on this chart so like think of these two here's like Spanish and Portuguese they share a lot of vocabulary and a lot of grammatical structures but then these two languages will be like English and Mandarin they have almost nothing in common now when you move from one key signature to another we call it modulation and when you modulate between two closely related key signatures like our Portuguese and Spanish examples here there isn't that much of an issue the peace will flow really well but when you jump from one side of the circle to the other it starts sounding super freaky and jarring like you notice it it'll start feeling foreign okay so back to our story so the father and son are riding through the woods and whenever the son tells the father that he sees something in the woods and a minor key which understandably makes it sound like the kid is freaking out but when the dad responds the piece moves back into a major key because the father's trying to reassure his son that everything's okay and when the Earl conics starts talking it's also in a major key but instead of trying to sound comforting like the dad the elf king is trying to lure the son in five nights at freddy style but as the story goes on the father starts responding in a minor key because he's getting more and more worried about his son and the real horrorshow comes on the elfking gets frustrated that the kid won't get in the van and switches to a minor key while delivering the line owned bist du nicht village zou blue-ish gevalt which means and if you're not willing I shall use force how creepy is that but as all this is happening Schubert is slowly moving away from the key signature that the piece started in which makes even the major key signatures start to sound more stressed intense and then Schubert ends the piece by returning to the key signature that the piece originally started in mirroring how the father and son have kind of returned home both all this all this depth and complexity which to be honest really wasn't anything new back then there's one aspect to this piece that just kind of redefined how I looked at things uh now before I start taking a lot of heat from the academic side of the Internet if you want to know the details of this next part this is the originally published idea okay so throughout this piece you hear this motif this is the Earl Koenig motif this motif represents the Earl conics presence in both the piece and the story and according to Schenker's motivic parallelisms when you take the first note of the most emphasized key signatures that Schubert moves through within this piece you get these notes and when you play these notes on the lower register of a piano this is what you get so for those of you who need it spelled out the very musical languages that the characters were speaking in the story were contained within the ketubah Lovecraftian presence of the elf king that was floating through the woods and wanted this kid's soul as if it didn't matter what the characters did they were already trapped within the elf king spell and his son was doomed from the beginning now there are some people that say that this whole idea is a big case of finding what you're looking for which is a bias that I struggle with all the damn time in music theory but honestly it doesn't matter if it's what Schubert had originally intended or even if this argument has any validity at all what matters is that music has this kind of capacity for telling the story up into this point in my life all I had ever worried about was whether another music sounded good do I like this and that's the only purpose I found in music theory music theory was just a way to figure out and emulate pieces of music that I enjoyed but after seeing what this piece either is or could have been I realized that music can develop a narrative in a way that no other medium could so naturally I rushed home and I went to all my video game scores and transcriptions looking for these patterns I figured there's some nineteen year old and 1800's had done it then hired professionals would have put these narrative devices in their games and to this day I have struggled to find musical patterns like the one in dare Earle Koenig in film or television or even in video game soundtracks now that now that is not to say that they don't exist there is plenty of well-crafted music in mainstream media I just have yet to find something as planned out as what was in Darrell Koenig like best-case scenario here is that I'm miserably wrong and there's somebody blowing me out of the water in the comments section right now but remember I'm not just talking about having like themes or light motifs dotted around your score or anything like that because that's relatively basic stuff I'm not talking about something like Skyward Sword we're like The Ballad of the goddesses Zelda's Lullaby play backwards it's like okay so does that mean the Zelda's like the opposite of the goddess like if you really wanted to have a relationship between the two you could have turned the melody upside down which is technically called inverting um that's something composers have been doing for hundreds of years by having the Ballad of the goddess in Zelda's Lullaby be retrograde of one another it kind of seems like Zelda the goddess two opposites of one another and at odds which I don't really think fits the bill I'm talking about something really intricate where you might use a basic technique like using light motifs but then use that to take your score to the next level like the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series had individual themes for the main cast as a matter of fact in one a great scene the green arrows zip lines onto a submarine while singing the light motif to his own theme so why not create seven light motifs for seven main characters of the new Justice League film but then construct them in a way so that those seven light motifs can come together to form the main theme for the film or like at the very least just have a television show or game or something that develops a relationship between key signatures that actually imitates the relationship between the characters in the story like so what does all music and all video games in television and film just suck no of course not but the problem is when you don't look at music critically and just consume it on a visceral how does it make you feel level you facilitate a pop music ideology nowadays when people write music you hear things like oh I was just I was inspired or I just let the music flow or oh it just felt right and what's happening is that this person isn't gifted with some sort of divine grace what's happening is that this person is distilling elements of music that they have experienced in the past if they want a piece of music to sound sad they'll probably look to pieces of music that made them feel sad and take elements from those pieces either consciously or subconsciously and combine them into a new creation instead of actually manufacturing a musical narrative that will earn that sad moment this is the big reason that most of us think that major scales sound happy and minor scales sounds sad we've been raised to believe that um it's kind of like the difference between a character that you've grown attached to suddenly dying and motivating your hero and finding the hero's girlfriend in a refrigerator one is inherently validating you don't need to have any prior life experience to be attached to eros by the time she dies spoilers eros ties but I imagine that if you're going through a really rough breakup and you end up reading this panel you aren't exactly going to have the reaction that the writers had intended when they originally wrote the panel see what ends up happening when you don't critically look at music is that all the most popular successful music that you may end up liking becomes music that's written by people who have listened to and enjoyed the same music that you have listened to by proxy it's not necessarily music that's well crafted for the purpose of the narrative so much as it's music that you're already familiar with whether you realize it or not and it serves to bring together and identify a community and this isn't necessarily a bad thing just look at how many groups there are out there that Revere game music from the 80s and 90s and breathe new life into them decades after they came out but what ultimately happens is that the music that's crafted for an entire medium becomes a genre of music onto itself and effectively this is how tropes are born so like did something dramatic just happened let's have that inception boom everyone's seen inception and knows that that something dramatic just happened is the main character hero let's play some brass because Superman had brass for his theme and it'll make everyone associate the protagonist with a comic-book superhero and if it isn't the composer's consciously making this call then it's their supervisors the directors even the producers chances are that these higher-ups aren't classically trained in music and in many cases won't know that music is capable of developing and unfolding a story as sophisticated as Schubert didn't Darrel Koenig it took me into my second year of college to realize the real impact that music and having a narrative like okay let's look at Kubrick disclaimer here I'm not a film guy so I can't tell you what Kubrick's films are so great but in 2001 a Space Odyssey Kubrick tempt the film with the infamous Strauss along with a couple other pieces and by the time he heard the original score written by Alex North he had grown so attached to Strauss that he just left Strauss in the film and poor Alex North having had put all that time and effort into composing an original score for the film didn't find out that Kubrick had scrapped his original score until the premiere screening when he was sitting down watching the film so the people calling the shots need to understand that just because the music might feel familiar and comfortable to them doesn't necessarily mean that the music will be effective in their story and as a byproduct of directors and producers just putting in what they think sounds good you end up seeing these people with almost no experience being hired to write music professionally who show up almost out of nowhere with an amazing soundtrack whose only reason as to how their sound check was so amazing is well yes of listening to 80 synth pop my entire life so when I wrote this soundtrack I wanted something that was like a decent pop at the very least like related to 80s synth-pop because they just really like 80 synth pop but if your game just so happens to be 80s themed and has something to do with craft work then you want something that sounds like 80s synth pop and all the sudden it's a match made in heaven regardless of any kind of purposeful synchronization between the game and the music now as an aspiring professional is this frustrating immensely but it pales in comparison to the real issue which is that nobody wants to waste their time with all this games nowadays tend to not have an integrated coordinated soundtrack I mean it made sense for games of the past to have music that endlessly loop due to the technical restrictions of the hardware but now in many cases the music in the game might as well be a Spotify playlist which is the exact same thing that a lot of films have recently begun to do probably because the studio has know that an unoriginal soundtrack won't cause them to lose pre-order sales or ticket to the box office while still cutting down on total cost of production for video games specifically it isn't necessary to have an incredibly intricate soundtrack for a videogame to be successful because it's never really been at the forefront of the gaming community's collective concerns but up until recently neither was having your game run at 60 frames per second you can have a game that sells millions and millions of copies that runs at a smooth cinematic 24 frames per second and having a game that runs at 60fps doesn't guarantee that'll be contender for Game of the Year but the truth is that you aren't going to have a masterpiece nowadays that doesn't run at 60fps if it's just at 24 you're going to be flavor of the month and as soon as all the let's players finish their run throughs everyone's going to forget about it if people are going to start demanding quality from the media that they consume why is music being left behind why have 60 FPS gameplay without 60fps music

Channel: undefined

Views: 444,051

Rating: 4.9269042 out of 5

Keywords: Schubert, Film Music, Film, Music, Music Theory, Music Education, Theory, Education, Erlkonig, Erlking, Elfking

Id: BcnSX319OhI

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 06 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/BronsonSenpai]

This kind of went in the opposite direction I thought/hoped it would. The Schubert piece allows him to realize the potential (storytelling) depth of music, yet this potential depth becomes a means to reduce and scrutinize contemporary examples, rather than deepen his understanding and appreciation of them. The title then becomes a bit sad; "The Song that Changed his life" apparently just makes him (in his own words) "immensely frustrated".

I'd also add that he seems overly dismissive of emotional impact by association/precedent, and moreover that "visceral"-type listener (of the "pop-music ideology"). I don't imagine even music majors watch a film and measure its exact movement around the circle of fifths, nor do they internalize it to where its emotional impact is consciously "earned". In his off-time I imagine him staring at a plain sheet of music, nodding his head to unvoiced notes and tapping his feet to two dimensions.

[u/crash7800]

Guy with a music degree working in gaming here. (note - not making music for games)

This is interesting and fun up til about the 13:00 minute mark.

Then it goes right off a cliff. Weird, wonky "60 FPS" assertion aside, there are MANY more considerations for why different games use music differently.

And if your desire is to make music for games then you need to figure out whether that's your goal or whether making music for AAA games is your goal.

[u/Legionofdoom]

Am I the only one that thought that the text coming up on the screen when not related or they seemed like internal thoughts and meta comments were a little distracting rather than helpful?

[u/Jman5]

The guy makes a good point however I think he's missing something. If you want stuff like this popping up in video games or movies, you need to make the concept click with casual listeners. They don't need to grasp the full depth that requires an understanding of music theory, but there needs to be some layer they can peel back and appreciate. That way they have already taken the first step and they know there is something more there then a catchy tune. Perhaps if you do this long enough and get the industry on board you will begin to educate the casual listeners like myself on what to look for and expect.

Having said all this, I have absolutely no idea how you go about making this stuff approachable without issuing a music theory primer at the start of your game.

Actually maybe that's not such a bad idea.

[u/colourofawesome]

If anyone wants to watch an excellent video that discusses this in film check out the recent Every Frame a Painting video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

And actually most of his videos would fit this sub perfectly, I highly recommend his channel.

[u/phasetwenty]

The song was "Der Erlkönig" by Schubert.

[u/[deleted]]

I wish there was a 0.75x speed option on youtube, this guy speaks way too fast to be enjoyable to listen to.