Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack, by Andrew Schartmann

In 2015, Mario was turning 30, as were many of us who had grown up with him. Though Nintendo’s 35th anniversary celebration turned out to be the much bigger deal, that year did see the release of Andrew Schartmann’s illuminating Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack from 33 1/3. “I’m convinced,” Schartmann writes in the introduction, “that nostalgia is only part of the reason Mario and his music continue to enthrall our senses in the most positive of ways. There’s also something fundamentally engaging about the music itself […] My hope is to turn that ineffable ‘something’ into words.”

We’re all about seeking to understand video games’ ineffable somethings here on The Pixels. We, too, strive to translate nostalgic musings into shared experiences–hopefully positive–so I was jazzed to read this one. Find yourself a copy and read it with the brief SMB soundtrack playing to listen along as Schartmann breaks down the Koji Kondo sound. For fans of Mario and music (which between them has got to be basically everyone), it’s a joy to leap flagpoles and descend green pipes with our intrepid music theorist guide.

To take a step back before we jump in: the story behind 33 1/3 has mystified observers. This hip imprint of Bloomsbury originally began as a music geek’s answer to short introductions to academic topics like philosophy. If that sounds impossibly niche, according to Billboard we should consider its continued existence a byproduct of the success of Harry Potter. Each book is slim, small, colorful, and deals with a single album. Boss Fight has adapted the formula for their books on video games directed at a popular audience, and there are similar series on influential game designers and topics, but so far Koji Kondo is the only game music composer featured in the flagship run.

The book opens with some material which, in hindsight, is a little weak for a lead single. First comes a fairly benign foreword, penned by Tommy Tallarico–yes, he of the Video Games Live concert series, as the book notes, but he, too, of the Intellivision Amico and the Roblox court battle, which the book couldn’t have known. Schartmann then issues his preface, which comes off as needlessly defensive. The swing from the slightly unhinged exuberance of the one to the behind-covering gestures of the other is jarring. But like I say, I can hardly find fault with the remainder of the book, which is to say, the whole actual book.

That aside, then, we come to the intro, where Schartmann lays out the stakes (see “ineffable,” above) and sketches an outline for the structure to follow. The text is divided into two main Worlds: Contexts and Music.

In the first part of the book we get a summary of the state of the video game industry in the ’70’s-’80’s. The Atari crash with its attendant desert landfill and the white knight/new sheriff NES are trotted out. Even in this chapter, though, there is helpful analysis and nuance. Nintendo’s decision to recall the initial Famicom shipment in Japan, and pre-Nintendo Power examples of Howard Philips’ canny combination of parental advocacy with marketing, were both small aha moments here for me.

The second chapter in World 1 is where things start to get really interesting. For one thing, the frame for the discussion is by way of Tim Follin’s Silver Surfer soundtrack–great, “virtuosic” music on a terrible game–as opposed to the situation in which Koji Kondo found himself, composing for the classic Super Mario Bros. Kondo’s background, drawing on material from various interviews, sets the scene for discussions of his musical philosophy and the instrumentals at his disposal. Both the description of the NES hardware and the composing principles Kondo brings to bear on it are excellent.

Because Kondo himself was not available for interview, Schartmann relies on a Wired piece by Chris Kohler and a profile by Chris Greening, but he also includes a conversation with Neil Baldwin for some fresh perspective on the approaches of Kondo and others to the challenges of composing for video games. Thereafter, in World 2, we shift into a more theoretical look at Kondo’s musical effects and how they are achieved.

There is much more to Schartmann’s discussion of the soundtrack proper than I feel qualified to parse, richly musicological as it is. I can summarize, though, without getting too much into the details. In overarching terms, World 2 brings forward examples and explanations of Kondo’s music’s “two principal functions: (1) to convey an unambiguous sonic image of the game world and (2) to enhance the emotional and physical experience of the gamer.” Chapters deep-dive on individual tracks and show their relationships, musical and thematic, to the gameplay and indeed “narrative” evoked by SMB.

Schartmann makes much of the light/dark palette established by the ground theme and underground bop, but the interplay of these musical strands with the underwater waltz and ominous castle ambience is complex and fascinating. More than once, he remarks on the surprising variations Kondo spins within such a limited sonic structure, like the inclusion of the water waltz right before the end of Bowser’s Castle. More than once, he writes that it would take him another entire book to give due care to the topics under discussion, clearly chafing at the limitations on his own writing imposed by the 33 1/3 imprint, for all its cachet. (References to Karen Collins’ Game Sound and Schartmann’s own Maestro Mario suggest avenues for further reading.)

In one sense, the more musical knowledge readers bring to the book, the more rewarding it will be. But in another sense the opposite is true: with sufficient concentration and listening, anyone will find much here to grow their musical knowledge, but the reader who knows least coming into it will stand to learn the most.

Some of the recurring themes include Kondo’s…

Influences, both acknowledged (Ravel’s Bolero) and un- (Deep Purple’s April, around the 2:00 mark)
Favorites, and how to account for them
Purposes, in overview and in some depth with specific tracks
Puzzle-solving and approaches to technical matters
Musical history, ie. waltz (see also William Gibbons, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music)
Sound effects and embodied cognition (citing here Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By)
Evolving from the “attract mode” mentality to music, as games move from high scores to narrative

Overall, the book is a musical offering, a labor of love in the best sense. There is so much here, packed into such a short book, and yet it never feels dense in any overwhelming way, just magnificent. While I had hoped to learn more about how Kondo blends traditional Japanese and western musical traditions, I came away with much more about the universality of great music.