The ethnomusicology of Samurai Shodown
I was talking to someone about how frustrated I am with the lack of attention given to the Samurai Shodown OST, which was so influential to my development. It's lowkey is the reason I'm a shinobue player today; I've been longing to understand and play those strange, exciting, seemingly rhythmless flutes for longer than you can imagine, and I cannot being to describe how disappointing it was to go to a regular music school and be given a recorder and a metronome.
Because like, samsho wasn't just my first contact with traditional Japanese music, it was my first contact with any sort of musical tradition outside the hegemony of Western/postindustrial globalised music theory brain, at all. But it's so much less impactful than I thought it would've been. Even inside the videogame fandom, there's nobody doing covers or anything, no transcriptions, nothing, it can't compare with contemporary games like Zelda or Final Fantasy soundtracks. There's approximately one billion takes on every single ocarina song from Zelda but nobody even tried to play the Nakoruru theme on the entire Youtube? Not even once? Hello?! I have hipster tendencies so I thought I'd pass on “Banquet of Nature” because it would be too cliché for flute players, and yet…
And I mean, it's not like we're spoiled for choice in iconic flute themes in videogame OSTs. Still what I thought was the most iconic Japanese fluteing turned out not to be iconic at all?
Morever it seems like SNK never released sheet music for them, or at least I couldn't find any from Doremi Gakufu or anything. I'm like but this is really good though?!? This music exists so presumably someone actually composed actual fucking honkyoku and kabuki music and whatnot, what happened to all their journals and notes about it and stuff? The brief remarks on the Samsho IV Arrange inset are all we get? The Arrange is actual live instruments, any comments from the shakuhachi players, the shamisen, the taiko?
[Edit : I've since found out that a handful of scores have been printed with various OST CD inserts: Banquet of Nature “Winter” and “Spring”, from samsho1 and 2 respectively; the excellent shakuhachi rock theme Homura, aka Honoo, from ss4 Kazama; and an intriguing shaku piece for Shizumaru Tsubana-Nagashi, from samsho2019.]
Then later I was thinking also of how frustrating it is that there's nothing like “8-bit theory” or “Charles Cornell”, like, those channels that analyse videogame music with theory and then explain how a piece works, but with ethnomusicology rather than Western tradition concepts. Because I'm dying to know like, what are even these musics? Is “Successively Foreign Girl” technically what, jiuta? tsugaru? It's frustrating, I think, that no one seems to look at Shuradō from Samurai Shodown IV to say, ah yes that's a tetrachord in E/A with the colour note in F, which makes it miyako-bushi, in the “ascending” variant because it has a 3-semitone interval (it uses D not C), and the progression follows a textbook jo-ha-kyū structure, much like “Successively Foreign Girl”, notice how the shakuhachi follows the drumbeats during and after the accelerando of the “ha” but it was much freeer with tempo on the “jo” and lets go again in the brief 'kyū”, it is instructive to compare the OST and Arrange versions because it shows how the timing of fermata in Japanese music can be intuitive and—
Only then I looked at the mirror and realised, huh it's a me. I'm her. I'm the one doing ethnomusicology analysis of the Samurai Shodown soundtrack.
Which is a bit of a scary thought because like, it's not like this is my field, weeb or not my knowledge of Japanese music tradition is cursory at beast, it cannot compare to a specialist who went to college for this. Nor of course my knowledge of general Western music stuff, I know less than the average person who can actually play an instrument. Like I said, I can't even tell which genres or tropes most of the samsho tracks are referencing. Then again this is an obscure videogame from the 90s and apparently nobody else seems interested in even trying, so…