THE BANNER SAGA - Austin Wintory
Game music has come such a long way from the early days of arcade beat 'em ups and racing simulators. Concerts fill auditoriums around the world, Best of Albums are being downloaded at an ever increasing rate, scores are included with deluxe editions of the games and composers are ultimately in high demand. Forget the high profile Hollywood A-Lister who produces a couple of themes for a mainstream franchise... it seems that crowd-funded projects are where composers are looking to get their teeth into projects that are still in the development stages. The Banner Saga is such a process and is yet another powerhouse score delivered by the ever popular Austin Wintory. Involved from a very early stage of the games development we are treated to a score that is reminiscent of an early Goldsmith, Steiner or Korngold. Whilst it would be easy to rest on the laurels of success for his Grammy nominated work Journey, Austin has rasied the bar to new heights and has produced a fine score that highlights why the gaming industry is investing so much time and money in securing the talents of top composers.
Recored with the Dallas Wind Symphony it occured early in the composition process that to tell the story and support the gameplay it would be necessary to do something very different; as a result we are provided with a score that features very little stringed instruments. In a recent interview Austin Wintory explains:
“There was something about brass and percussion that seemed to naturally address all the dramatic problems proposed by the game, so at some point I thought, ‘What if I simply committed to it being a wind ensemble piece, and eliminated the strings altogether?’ And of course, as soon as I had that idea, my brain went to, ‘And what if I then reached out to Jerry Junkin about collaborating on the recording?’”
It is far to say that there will be many people expecting to hear a reprise of Journey material and to do so would be to do a diservice to the role of a game composer. What Wintory has done with this Norse inspired RPG is take the concepts of culture and mythology and apply them a fresh, new and inspired textural overlay. From powerhouse percussion that drives the score forward on an epic scale through to the more subtle and poetic woodwinds, Austin Wintory has paved a new path for aspiring composers to follow... showing how to support, redirect and remove a gamer from the action and gameplay.
The tracks are beautifully mastered and produced and whilst sound great as stand alone pieces I imagine that they are substantially more powerful when accompanied by the action on screen. At 71 minutes the listener is given a real opportunity to experience the musical canvas that Austin Wintory has coated lavishly with his tones and layers. Certain elements and paths are very close in structure to the Castlevania scores by Oscar Araujo and this highlights the quality of the music.
A recent interview with Austin explaining his writing process sums up the approach to this score:
"As you might expect the story quickly takes a turn, where our focus shifts to a father/daughter story struggling to survive an emergent, rather apocalyptic threat," Wintory said. "Here the music gets very intimate, leaning on solo violin, played gloriously by Taylor Davis, and using primarily the woodwinds from the orchestra."
The characters eventually reach an ancient city, which leads to a fuller, more majestic cue, and Wintory made the music leading to that moment "smaller and smaller" in order to maximize the impact of the scene. "So THAT is what you are hearing in Track 16, 'Three Days to Cross.' It's actually two cues, and they play in the opposite order in-game," he explained. "The first 30 seconds, the unaccompanied flute solo, in-game come after the second section, which begins with the violin solo before handing off to the orchestra. There is also a lot flanking those cues in-game, including possible combat interruptions and such, which obviously change the music on the fly."
"It's a fascinating, equal parts wonderful and agonizing process to completely step back and reevaluate one's music in order to translate it from game score to album. There is no standard approach I've found," he said.
"I remember when doing both flOw and Monaco I ended up basically totally re-writing the soundtrack for album purposes. It is a literal re-write in order to make it feel right as an album. If I did my job right, no one ever noticed. In the case of Journey, much like The Banner Saga, the music wasn't re-written but it was stripped apart rather heavily and rebuilt using the raw guts."
A very good score that provides a fusion of sounds rich in content, ideas and pathways and it delivers with a kick.
Puchase the album: CLICK HERE
