Film Music: Borrowed Classics and Video Game Scores
Borrowed Classics and Game Scores: Completing the Picture
You have already studied how composers write original music to fit a mood, a character or an action. This final lesson covers two remaining strands of Area of Study 4: music from the Western Classical tradition that directors borrow and place inside a film, and music composed specifically as a soundtrack for a video game. Both strands ask you to think about function — what job is the music doing on screen or in play — rather than just describing sound in isolation.
Why Directors Borrow Existing Classical Music
Sometimes a director chooses a pre-existing classical piece instead of commissioning something new. This is usually for one of three reasons: the music instantly signals a historical period or cultural setting, its scale and grandeur are already proven and impossible to fake cheaply, or its familiar mood creates deliberate irony when placed against unexpected images.
Key idea: when classical music is borrowed rather than composed for the film, explain the effect of the choice — for example, how a joyful piece placed over a violent scene creates disturbing irony, not just to name the piece and composer.
A famous case is Francis Ford Coppola’s use of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now. The cue was written in the 1850s for Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, depicting mythical warrior maidens riding through storm clouds. In the film it is blasted from loudspeakers during a helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village.
Listen for the driving dotted rhythms, the bright brass fanfare figures and the rising sequential melody that build unstoppable energy and grandeur. In the opera this represents heroic flight; in the film the same triumphant character becomes deeply ironic, because it accompanies destruction rather than heroism. This mismatch between the music’s original meaning and its new context is exactly what is meant by dramatic irony through borrowed music.
Another well-known example is Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, composed in 1896, used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The opening ‘Sunrise’ fanfare begins with a low sustained organ pedal note, then a simple rising three-note trumpet figure outlining the interval pattern C–G–C, answered by full orchestra and timpani famously alternating between C major and C minor, so the harmony feels vast but unsettled. Kubrick places this music over images of a sunrise and, later, of humanity’s evolutionary leap towards technology. The music’s original programme — mankind striving toward the ideal of the Superman in Nietzsche’s philosophy — matches the film’s theme of human evolution and transcendence perfectly, giving Kubrick instant scale and philosophical weight without writing a note himself.
Composing Music for Video Games: A Different Challenge
Film music is written to fit a fixed, linear sequence of images that never changes. Game music faces a completely different problem: the player controls pacing, so a composer never knows exactly when an event will happen or how long a level will take. A single cue might need to loop for two minutes or twenty depending on how the player performs.
To solve this, game composers write in short repeatable loops and in layers. A base loop (perhaps a quiet ambient pad or simple ostinato) plays constantly, while extra layers — a rhythmic percussion line, a melodic countermelody, aggressive brass stabs — are added or removed depending on what is happening in the game, such as entering combat or discovering a new area.
Key idea: this is called adaptive or dynamic scoring. It comes in two main forms — vertical layering, where instrumental layers are muted or unmuted, and horizontal re-sequencing, where the music jumps between different short musical segments depending on player choices.
Middleware software links the music engine to the game engine so that these layers and transitions trigger automatically and seamlessly, without the player noticing a jarring edit. This means composers must write music that works musically in almost any combination of layers or order, which is a very different compositional discipline from writing a single fixed film cue.
Leitmotif and Identity in Game Music
Leitmotif works just as powerfully in games as in film, giving players an instantly recognisable musical identity for a character, faction or place. Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori’s theme for Halo is one of the most famous examples in game music history.
Listen for the low male chant, drawing on the sound world of Gregorian monastic chant, set over a simple repeating string ostinato in a rolling compound metre. The austere, ritualistic timbre suggests ancient duty and sacrifice, fitting the Spartan soldier-hero Master Chief, and the motif recurs throughout the series in variation, always instantly identifiable even when re-orchestrated for full orchestra in later games.
Koji Kondo’s theme for The Legend of Zelda works in a similar way, giving the whole franchise a recognisable musical signature.
The main theme uses a bold, fanfare-like rising melody with a strong sense of major-key adventure, built from simple, singable phrases that can be looped, sped up, slowed down or reharmonised for different moods across dozens of games. Kondo’s earliest scores, including Super Mario Bros., were written within the severe hardware limits of 1980s consoles, so melodic simplicity and strong motivic identity were not just an artistic choice but a technical necessity.
From Chip-Tune to Live Orchestra: Technology and Resources
Early game consoles such as the NES could only generate a handful of simple wave shapes (square waves, triangle waves and basic noise channels) at once, producing the bright, bleepy ‘chiptune’ sound of games like the original Super Mario Bros. Composers had to write catchy, harmonically simple melodies that still worked with only three or four simultaneous notes.
Modern game scores have far greater resources. Many blockbuster titles now use full live orchestras and choirs recorded in professional studios, alongside sampled instrument libraries and synthesised sounds, mixed using the same digital audio workstations used in film scoring. Middleware tools such as Wwise and FMOD allow all of this recorded material to be layered and triggered dynamically inside the game engine.
Key idea: the shift from chiptune to live orchestral recording mirrors the growth of the games industry itself — as budgets and technology increased, so did the scale and realism of the resources composers could call on.
You should be able to name composers working in this field: Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda), Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori (Halo), and Jesper Kyd, whose scores for the Assassin’s Creed series blend live orchestra with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean instrumental colours, electronic textures and choral writing to evoke historical settings such as Renaissance Italy and the Crusades.
Applying This in Your Listening Exam
When a question gives you a borrowed classical extract used in a film, always discuss the relationship between the music’s original character and its new dramatic context — is the fit direct (grandeur matching scale) or ironic (joy contrasting with violence)? When a question gives you a game music extract, listen specifically for signs of looping, layering or a leitmotif, and mention how the music could adapt to different player actions even though you are only hearing one fixed excerpt.
Always anchor your answer in named musical elements — ostinato, metre, orchestration, dynamics — rather than vague descriptions like ‘epic’ or ‘exciting’, and where possible name the actual work and composer, since specific, accurate detail is what separates the highest band answers from generic ones.