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carlodivarga-s:

we’re doing pathologic musicology again. everybody shut up. i’m sick of writing about bel canto musical traditions and my jstor subscription dies tomorrow i think. so i’m pre-emptively saving pdfs about ethnomusicology.

interesting side effect of the town’s culture being mostly built around cattle rather than horses is that the soundtrack of p2 in particular has essentially ended up creating an entire musical history and lexicon that is identifiably SIMILAR to that of The Area Near The Baikal Rift Valley while being obviously different.

classic’s soundtrack interestingly arrives at a similar point to this with completely different means in that the classic soundtrack is basically just. ‘is it bleeping and blooping? ok sick ship it’, while also borrowing at points quite clearly from the actual musical traditions of the region. which produces the effect in the listener of, basically ‘this should sound… other than how it does? but it makes sense?

p2′s soundtrack is trying more obviously to do Authenticity in a way that. has historical precedent, certainly (hi borodin). but it is also trying to do that by borrowing from musical traditions that don’t completely mesh with the way that the town’s musical traditions would have developed. because the town-on-gorkhon is very fond of bulls, culturally speaking, and not horses.

a lot of the extant classical music from the area where pathologic is (presumably) set is not only literally About Horses, which are culturally important, but musically refer to the various gaits of The Horse. (this example is in tuvan but it is not only about horses but the 2/4 rhythm is Trotting-Like. buryat music uses similar music and the same scale, and many of the same instruments, as tuvan music.)

this is not something that bulls particularly have, and so while bulls occupy an equivalent cultural position in the town-on-gorkhon this obviously necessitates a completely different musical tradition. which is also one that doesn’t really exist in the real world, but for which vasily kashnikov and theodor bastard have pulled from existing traditions. they have, however, also created an entire musical language that feels like a place’s musical language essentially out of whole-cloth.

the way that they have done this is essentially to take something about the culturally important animal (lowing, for the bulls – similarly to how actual tuvan, mongolian, baikal, and yakut music refers to horses’ gaits). and then to use that as a basis for the musical ‘world’ of the game, in a similar way to how extant music uses horses. it’s most obviously used in ‘song to boddho’ but a lot of the music in p2 makes a lot of use of drone which could quite easily be interpreted as The Sound That The Local Culturally Important Beast Makes.

(also the p2 soundtrack has a passacaglia in it. this isn’t relevant to this conversation in any way but it’s neat.)

1 month ago   &   173
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