Winifred Phillips on Polytonality in Jurassic World Primal Ops
Winifred Phillips Discusses the Power of Polytonality in Her Music for Jurassic World Primal Ops This is a very interesting topic by Winifred Phillips, who discusses the power of polytonality in her music for the game Jurassic World Primal Ops in her article "Polytonality (The Game Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops: GDC 2023)."
Phillips describes polytonality as a harmonic device that allows composers to simultaneously assert multiple tonal centers in their music. This can be used to create a sense of tension, anxiety, and dissonance, which is particularly effective in video game music.
You’ll find all these ideas discussed in detail in these three articles:
Part One: Tonic Pivot (The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops: GDC 2023)
Part Two: Quartal Chords and Chromatics (The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops: GDC 2023)
Part Three: Whole Tone and Octatonic Scales (The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops: GDC 2023)
Some extract from the original article:
"We’d just finished discussing the fantastic utility of both the Octatonic and whole-tone scales, which are particularly useful when we’re pushing our music away from a classic harmonic structure and towards atonality. But now let’s take a moment to step away from atonality altogether, and consider its close cousin – polytonality.
We’re all very familiar with traditional key signatures. In classic music theory, key signatures control what chords we hear, what harmonic progressions may occur, and how melodies might take shape. When we go fully atonal, we distance ourselves from these rules – but with polytonality, we keep using them – albeit in a devious way.
Instead of hiding the tonal center, we construct our music to assert more than one at a time.
When listening to a track expertly structured in this way, we can sense multiple separate and distinct key signatures happening simultaneously, and this is great at creating some really interesting harmonic complexity. Best of all, the music can include classically-diatonic melodies on top – and still feel conspicuously weird, due to all the unrelated chord structures going on underneath.
I want to share some musical examples of polytonality now – with the caveat that this stuff can get pretty complicated. I’ll be going through a bunch of details here, but mostly to give you a general feel for how polytonality works. Let’s start by checking out a relatively simple example.
This is another piece of music that accompanies ‘tracking’ sequences when players are searching for wild dinosaurs. I built the music around the whole tone scale – we already discussed how this scale works in the music of Jurassic World Primal Ops. For this particular composition, I put the initial chord structure into the C wholetone scale.
Winifred Phillips · The C Wholetone Scale
But the bassline is assertively hitting D flat as the root tone:
Winifred Phillips · The D Flat Root Tone
And D flat is not at all in the C wholetone scale. Plus, half of the foreground melody is written with a D flat major feel:
Winifred Phillips · The D Flat Major Scale
Then, the other half of the foreground melody follows the C wholetone scale:
Winifred Phillips · The C Wholetone Scale
The chords support the melody by swinging back and forth between D flat major and C wholetone – making the entire thing feel bizarrely unstable. Let’s check that out now – you’ll see that I’ve included some of the notation on-screen, with the D flat major and C wholetone content divided into different staves so we can track what’s happening:
Now I want to share with you a more complex example of polytonality in the music I composed for Primal Ops. We’re going to be listening to this music, but I’ll break it down for you first.
The orchestra begins with a repeating diminished 7th chord in D minor. The string section gives us some nervous figures in A flat minor. So – two simultaneous unrelated keys:
D minor:
Winifred Phillips · The Key of D Minor
A flat minor:
Winifred Phillips · The Key of A Flat Minor
After that, we modulate into a hard tonic pivot, which takes the background chords and the agitated string section into 7th chords in G major:
Winifred Phillips · The Key of G Major
While that’s happening, the melody and bass line move to B flat minor:
Winifred Phillips · The Key of B Flat Minor
So, there’s lots of polytonality! We’ll get a better sense of it when we’re listening to the music. As before, I’ve divided the different key signature content so we can follow along, and you’ll see that I’ve indicated where the modulation and the tonic pivot happen:
Polytonality is an uncommon harmonic device, just like the tonic pivots, quartal harmonies, Chromaticism, and exotic scales that we’ve discussed so far during this talk. All these techniques help us to break away from harmonic conventionalism. But harmony is just a piece of the puzzle, and it certainly isn’t the only way we can introduce chaos into our game scores.
In the next article of this series, we’ll be shifting our discussion away from harmonies, and talking about kinetics. In the meantime, you can read more about game music composition in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. Thanks for reading!
Phillips provides two examples of polytonality in her music for Jurassic World Primal Ops. In the first example, the bassline and melody are in different keys, while the chords alternate between the two keys. In the second example, the orchestra begins with a repeating diminished 7th chord in D minor, while the string section plays in A flat minor. The music then modulates to G major, while the melody and bass line move to B flat minor.
Phillips argues that polytonality, along with other techniques such as tonic pivots, quartal harmonies, and chromaticism, can help composers to break away from harmonic conventionalism and introduce chaos into their game scores.
In addition to her work on Jurassic World Primal Ops, Phillips has also composed music for other popular video game franchises such as Assassin's Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, and Sackboy / LittleBigPlanet. She has received numerous awards for her work, including an Interactive Achievement Award / D.I.C.E. Award, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards, and four Hollywood Music in Media Awards. From the original article here.
