Brass Tracks – The Music of Zelda Adapted

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time again his capability to tackle every genre of music and make it fit the context of the game he is writing for. Impressive as his compositional span is, what is more impressive is the quality of his work. From the point that you meet Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time for the first time to the point at which Midna is desperately in need of help from Zelda in Twilight Princess, Koji had captured emotional depth worthy of all the major classical composers of the past. Joy, terror, anxiety, intensity, passion – such emotions that the characters in the games feel, the music captures wonderfully.

Ultimately, I grew up playing the Zelda games and the themes from them will never be erased from my mind. They are just too brilliant.

Devin Fanslow: Adapting the music had its challenges, but for the most part they fit the ensemble just fine. A brass quintet features two trumpets, a trombone, French horn and a tuba. The amount of range that you have available is substantial, there is a lot of room to make some very powerful sounds and yet you can really be delicate with the instruments.

I like to think that I adapted a sort of Zelda adventure when writing this piece. The first theme that you hear is Link’s house theme. Then the themes from him sneaking around in the Hyrule Castle and the Lost Woods themes are introduced. So you might think of the beginning of the piece as the start of one of the games and then there are subsequent events that take place at each new theme.

All in all, if that doesn’t come across then that’s fine by me because the bottom line to choosing these themes is that I enjoy them. I don’t feel I really need a better reason than that when it comes to Zelda.

Zelda’s lullaby gets some time, as is the case when meeting Zelda towards the beginning of Ocarina of Time, but afterwards you hear the “Hyrule Field” theme. I wanted to include the themes from my three favorite games of the franchise: Ocarina, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess, though not necessarily in that order. These themes have always been the kind of quintessential parts of the games’ overall musical feel. You spend an awful lot of time in any of the

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incarnations of “Hyrule Field” (unless it’s “Termina Field”, but come on – it’s the same thing) in the games and I wanted to explore ways to connect them. I also used them as an opportunity to throw the dungeon theme in there.

The very last portion of the piece is a direct translation from orchestra to brass quintet of the music from the trailer for Twilight Princess. I’m actually amazed that the music used in that trailer wasn’t used for anything else. It is loud, big and joyous – it downright gave 14-year-old Devin goose bumps the first time I heard it. I felt it was a good thing to end the piece with as to make people in the audience want to go home and plug in their Nintendo.

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