Getting the Rhythm Wrong
For twenty years, I might have been been feeling the beat of a particular song incorrectly. Or have I?
Almost every Zelda soundtrack since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in 1998 has played the same piece of music when Link is inside of a house.
The key and arrangement vary depending on the game. Twilight Princess, for example, uses darker-sounding instruments, changes the key to F major, and adds a new section to the piece about a minute in:
It’s one of those tracks that has been ingrained into my very bones through untold hours of repetition, usually while smashing pots inside some poor NPC’s living room. I’ve always enjoyed the theme for its whimsical melody that relies on tritones against its syncopated bass line. It’s an active theme, despite being used for some of the only reliably danger-free areas in each game.
I asked my friend Will, who streams on Twitch under the name chip_boy, to attempt to play this particular theme on the piano during one of his livestreams. After a few minutes of picking out the melody and listening to a recording, Will becomes confused about the rhythm of the flute solo and whether it was on or off the beat. It seemed pretty clear to me that the melody was on the beat, and we ended up disagreeing about it; it struck me that Will was making it more difficult for himself by playing the melody in such a syncopated way.
Essentially, here’s how I’ve been hearing the rhythm for the past twenty years:
The bass line is heavily syncopated, frequently emphasizing entrances on the and-of-beat-4, but the melody is fairly straightforward and on the beat. Plus, the “long-short” articulations in the flute melody happen on strong beats.
It’s obviously this, right? Based on a search of YouTube, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
But according to officially-released sheet music…nope:
It took me a few minutes of deliberately following along with this second sheet music, and even playing “air bass”, to finally understand this piece in a different way.
Whether it’s “Inside a House” or trying to follow along to the wood block in “Slow Ride in a Fast Machine” by John Adams, I tend to enjoy being wrong about this sort of thing. I enjoy the feeling of being “tricked” by a piece of music into forgetting where beat 1 is, and I’m amused when my brain reorienting itself once a clear beat comes in.
I’m kind of mad about this one, though.
If you’ve made it this far and you’re a pianist, what do you think? Which version above is easier to play? Which sounds right to you based on the recording?
