Little Orpheus Soundtrack

Little Orpheus Soundtrack, Jessica Curry / Jim Fowler, 2020

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture had been another commercial and critical success for The Chinese Room, but the years that followed were rough for the studio. Thankfully, after having to lay off all staff in 2017, directors Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry recovered soon enough when Sumo Digital acquired the company, paving the way for 2020’s Little Orpheus. An Apple Arcade exclusive, the game drew acclaim for its substantial gameplay, distinctive concept, and outstanding presentation. It follows the adventures of Ivan Ivanovich, sent in 1962 into the supposedly hollow interior of the earth to determine whether it is fit for colonisation. When Ivan returns from his mission three years later, a hard-bitten general interrogates him, trying to decide whether the fantastical tales he recounts could possibly be true.

Like other titles by The Chinese Room, Little Orpheus was a high-concept work, channelling several ideas and influences at once. It therefore required a soundtrack capable of supporting the game’s aesthetics and narrative with real thoughtfulness. Jessica Curry had already delivered precisely those sorts of scores for several earlier Chinese Room projects. In the process, she had emerged as one of game music’s leading composers through the subtlety and emotional richness of works such as Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the latter deservedly earning her a BAFTA. After those meditations on life and death, Little Orpheus offered Curry a chance to work in brighter, more colourful moods, with the game taking inspiration from Saturday-morning B-movie serials and classic adventure films such as Flash Gordon, Sinbad, and The Land that Time Forgot.

For the first time, Curry was joined by a co-composer: Jim Fowler. Though hardly a household name, Fowler’s career in game music stretches back to 2004, when he first became involved with the long-running SingStar franchise. After that, he worked for Sony Worldwide Studios, balancing composing and orchestration duties on a number of projects, the best-known being the LittleBigPlanet series. Notably, he orchestrated Curry’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture in 2015. Following that project, he focused largely on production and orchestration, but more recent years have seen him return to composing more regularly. On the evidence of Little Orpheus, one can only hope that trajectory continues.

Indeed, the Little Orpheus soundtrack emerges as a serious contender for the best orchestral game score of 2020, even if its actual approach may come as a surprise to anyone who read the pre-release material. In his liner notes, Pinchbeck describes the music as a mixture of Disney and Shostakovich. Yet while one would expect Russian orchestral music to bear on a game like Little Orpheus, not much here feels particularly Russian in melodic or orchestral terms. Nor is there much trace of Shostakovich’s sharply profiled themes, acerbic wit, or despair.

Keeping the game’s pulpy inspirations in mind, one might also expect a score full of swashbuckling bravado and rousing melodies. But that is not what Curry and Fowler deliver either. Action-packed material is largely confined to the soundtrack’s shorter cues, which feel slighter than the more expansive pieces, though “Stealing Eggs” comes off well with its charmingly puckish mood. Elsewhere, their music is much more elusive, and arguably more intriguing for it. Rather than drawing chiefly on film music, the composers build on impressionistic early twentieth-century classical writing, where extensive chromaticism begins to loosen the grip of tonality. Take “The Jungles of Plutonia”, the album’s first extended composition. It may not have a pronounced sense of development, but its extraordinarily imaginative orchestration and harmonic language create a palpable atmosphere of hushed uncertainty, wonder, and lightly mischievous playfulness.

This is music far more sophisticated than the average orchestral game score, such is Curry and Fowler’s command of the ensemble’s colouristic and expressive possibilities. Like exquisite watercolours suddenly coming to life and redrawing their own outlines, the orchestrations shift constantly from one fascinating emotional mixture to the next. Melodies are certainly present, but they are slippery, only rarely settling into anything like a hummable tune. Add to this the composers’ extensive use of counterpoint and a demonstration-quality recording that presents the scores’ multiple layers with vivid clarity, often offering more than one instrumental line worth following at once. The result is a work whose abundance of steadily changing expression can feel heady and initially disorienting.

Yet what better way could there be to underscore the story of an apparently unreliable narrator spinning fantastical stories as he goes, just as the music keeps reinventing its instrumental combinations and expressive material, sometimes hard to grasp yet affecting all the same? Beneath all the virtuosic orchestration and shifting moods lies the emotional core of the Little Orpheus soundtrack, and it is anything but hollow. Before long, the score’s melodic wealth becomes unmistakable. Sometimes it appears unexpectedly, as when “Enslaving the Menkv”, after oscillating between nostalgia and tense expectancy, bursts into a gloriously impassioned string climax. “An Impoverished Childhood in Omsk” opens straight away with similar material, while “A Strangely Beautiful Place” and “The Icy Lands of Sannikov” set delicate melodies against unstable, swelling orchestral backdrops that seem perpetually on the verge of washing the lead line away.

Such elegant melodic beauty is central to what Curry and Fowler are trying to achieve. As they explained in interviews, “the music had to be vast and expansive” in order to reflect the outrageous scale of Ivan’s stories, “but at the same time, it comes from one little person”. And indeed, while the score performs the marvellous feat of building an entirely self-sufficient fantasy world, it continually balances that scale with a cheerful spirit and melodic grace that make us care for the common, brave man living through these tales: Ivan.

Notice, for example, the prominent passages for harp, glockenspiel, and solo violin on cues such as “Comrade Privalov, Interiornaut!”, “And It Happened Like This”, and “Agartha And Other Wonders”. These instruments lend the music the quality of a child’s story, both knowing and naive at once; Curry and Fowler never treat the narrative as a joke or lapse into parody. Among the several pieces that achieve this balance, “Agartha And Other Wonders” is particularly successful, combining a sense of otherworldly awe with touches of spirited whimsy. Like so much else on the Little Orpheus soundtrack, it testifies to the composers’ light but assured touch, and to a genuinely masterful result.