The Chrono Trigger Theme Has Insane Harmony

When I was in middle school, I played my real copy of Chrono Trigger DS on a one-hundred percent existent and legal DS. As a music obsessed kid, I spent a ridiculous amount of time figuring out how to play the music from the game on the piano. Now, over a decade later, I will finally reveal the secret of the harmony of the main theme that I figured out all those years ago.

I remember hearing a rumor circulating around the internet, at that time, that Yasunori Mitsuda wrote the Chrono Trigger theme in one unhealthy composition session. Now that I am a composer myself, that doesn't seem too unbelievable, but that doesn't make it any less badass. Chrono Trigger was his first soundtrack at Square Soft, and it worked that poor man into the ground. He actually had to get Uematsu's help because he was under so much stress that he developed chronic stomach ulcers and couldn't spend enough time in the office to finish writing.

Under all this stress, it is understandable that his creativity was stretched to its limit. Chrono Trigger's soundtrack represents a time in his life where he felt an incredible burden on his shoulders—but holy hell did it pay off. The Chrono Trigger's soundtrack has unreal variety and creativity. There are very few video game soundtracks that were made before or after that have remained as a model of how to define a generation of video games, and he did it with a 16-channel Super Nintendo sound chip.

It cannot be understated how iconic the main theme of Chrono Trigger is. It's adventurous, passionate, dynamic, and hopeful while exhibiting a sense of child-like wonder. The string pads have such a soothing disposition while the drums keep the energy high. The frequency spectrum is balanced and varied which causes the track to always feel fresh, but the real ingenuity is the harmony.

It's clear that Mitsuda is aware of many of the conventions of western composition, as his music is tonal adjacent, but he is definitely not tonal in the same way that Mozart is. Tonality has shifted over the years to allow more stretching of the rules in order to add deeper rhetorical elements of storytelling to music. Mitsuda is a master of modern composition rhetoric which is why his music plays into our modern sensibilities so effectively.

The primary harmonic device of the theme is a prolongation of predominant function, a concept that is unthinkable in western tonal music, but results in a feeling of being gently suspended in air.

Chrono Trigger theme here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1LDIPBWjtU

The introduction is a nice colorful i-vi-bII-i. i-vi implies an immediate shift from minor to major mode via prolongation of a function, a feature that will become more important in the A section.

His choice of chords in the A section is a iv7-ii7 vamp while the melody favors the structural scale degrees in Japanese music (which are 1, 4, 5, and b7). These scale degrees are ambiguous and work fine in both major and minor mode. This is important because iv7 implies minor mode while ii7 implies major mode.

In the context of Japanese music, minor ii7 is a special chord because it can brighten up cadences in a minor key. So much of Japanese music is in minor that they started to substitute iiø7-V with ii7-V in order to get the solfege syllables "La" "Ti" instead of "Le" "Ti". This is a sort of a reinvention of the melodic minor scale, but with more viable chords than are typically allowed in the historical ruleset. ii7 also has a perfect fifth between the root and the fifth and the third and seventh which is notable because it opens up more opportunities for parallel fifths (which are encouraged in Japanese counterpoint).

The iv7-ii7 vamp also has the same interval makeup as the tonic prolongation i7-vi7. This is neat because these progressions are actually interchangeable. The Chrono Trigger melody fits over both vamps equally well; however, there is a slight difference in sonority between the two. i7-vi7 feels more grounded while iv7-ii7 gives you the characteristic floatiness that Mitsuda's music is famous for. I even wrote a piece back in my undergrad that combined the two in a unique way. If you are a composer, I highly recommend playing around with these vamps, as they are really fantastic.

This was a lighter post this week because I really stretched myself thin with that massive dive into Pokémon, and I wanted to do some smaller posts for the people who don't want to spend all day studying chord charts. I wouldn't call this one bite sized, but it is definitely more tame than last week for sure.

I'm going to go back to playing VRChat, so good evening,

Evan Davis

All chord charts and diagrams created and owned by me. If you would like to use any of my figures, contact me at evandavispiano@gmail.com for permission.