The Music of REKKR Part II.

[HexenMapper]

Thought I'd type up a little bit on the final stage of the Music of REKKR (the fourth episode), as I recently wrote about this on my website

 

Steam Releaaaaase!

 

April 2021: REKKR - the viking / norse total conversion for the original Doom was doing pretty damn well by this point - it had been released by Bethesda through their mod workshop, and we had all been given a cash bonus from the company who we had only dreamed of working with as kids (iD software). It was at this time that project lead Revae was looking at creating a proper 4th episode for REKKR, as the 4th episode in late 2020 was a collection of maps that didn't make the cut for the original 3 episodes. Revae and his mapping minions were on the job, however, and had come up with an entire fourth episode of new maps.

 

 

Revae had also been tinkering with an executable for REKKR (rather than running the .wad file with something like zdoom) and gearing up for a full steam release. While he didn't have the budget for a full musical score for this new 4th episode (named "Sunken Land"), he did commission me to write three new tracks for the episode. These would be for the maps E4M1 - Postern, E4M7 - Ill Ellii, and E4M8 - Gardien.

 

 

Tinkering with Time

The music for E4M1 was fairly straight forward, and the music for E4M8 was to be boss battle music, but the map E4M7 / Ill Ellii posed a bit of a problem: the map involved time travel to 4 quite disparate locations. Firstly the player was taken to Ancient Egypt, and later in the map would visit a science fiction moonbase, modern day city, and ancient Rome... So how would I handle writing music for this? Clearly I need to find a middle ground that would support all 4 areas without leaning too much into the setting of either.

I decided to try find a cool angle that fit the idea of time travel. Some people (ok mostly just Goethe) say "music is liquid architecture, architecture is frozen music" - so music already exists over a period of time, I can't just write music and say it makes use of time, but there is a way to tinker with time using music...

I decided to make use of a musical device that involved temporal shenanigans - something as old as time itself (well as old as the baroque period at least) - the canon cancrizans, or "Crab Canon".
            
Oh shit, I've got crabs

           

 

Many moons ago (ok 1736), composers liked to play little musical games and puzzles, like "what If I played this piece upside down", or "what if we put this piece of music between us and played it reading from different directions?". Pieces like Bach's "The musical Offering" are full of these, and sometimes they'd expect the 'reader' to complete the puzzle in order to play the piece.

 

         

 

So what's with the crabs? well, one of these musical puzzles was called a Crab Canon, which involved a melody that if played backwards, would accompany itself. So how does this work? well, counterpoint - counterpoint.

counterpoint is like, I have a melody, and now I want a second melody that sounds good when I play both melodies at the same time. If you do it right, it sounds great. If you do it badly, it sounds meh. Composers in ye olde days loved counterpoint, but nowadays people think it's a bit old fashioned. To be fair, most composers don't think it's old fashioned, and in fact use it all the time, just maybe not as extensively as they did back in the period from like 1500 - 1900

Anyway, history lesson aside, crab canons are cool, and you can do cool shit with them. 

           

 

So I set out to write a crab canon, and use it as the spine of my track for this time travel map. Thanks to a little video from Adam Neely, I had some good resources on actually approaching the writing of a crab canon, as it's not something you can just kinda dive into.

And here's what I ended up coming up with - note this is MIDI data rendered by a default windows synthesizer, it aint gonna be pretty:

 

 

 

Note the backwards looking treble clef on the right hand side of the image above? yeah that's the secret code old timey composers used to say "play this fucker backwards and see what happens my dude"
 

The final track opens with a blown bottle motif, and immediately launches into heavy drums and low synth pads. Solo harmonica – an instrument I began to associate with loss of sanity – enters the fray, often microtonally pitched to unnerve the listener. The whole track has an eerie feeling, which is emphasized by the slow crab canon starting at 0:35. Material in this section seems to move forwards and backwards, appearing from different directions, and sometimes moving in opposite directions at the same time. By 2:06 the crab canon concludes and a more direct action section takes place, intensifying into a harmonica solo at the end of the track:

 

 

To be fair, a crab canon is something that no one would even notice just by listening - its more of a fun personal joke for the composer. It just so happened that in this case the unnerving, odd feel of the crab canon suited the gameplay and setting-jumping of the map nicely.

 

An example of one of Bach's more famous crab canons:

 

 

 

Why do I hear Boss Music?

 

For the very last map of the game, involving a fight against the game's main antagonist, I had to write some BOSS MUSIC! The first draft for this track was quite high-energy:

 

https://voca.ro/1hQQlicLmGva

 

Project lead Revae had the following feedback on this track: “That might be a little too high energy for the parts where you're not fighting, after the boss. It sounds nice, but aggressive. Trying to think of a way to balance that. Like if it were more like a dance or something. Or sinister I guess. A sinister waltz”

So I started again, trying to hit the sinister waltz trope. I presented two options to the Revae, a slower and faster version. The faster version was chosen, and so I progressed and expanded on the track, keeping the fast 3/4 feel throughout.

The final track takes us through this sinister waltz, with plenty of bending oboe solos, heavy drums, organ, harpsichord and choirs:
 

 

And so that's the story of the final phase of REKKR - Hope this has been interesting!

Edited September 6, 2022 by HexenMapper