Viva Piñata Soundtrack

Viva Piñata Soundtrack, Grant Kirkhope, 2006

There was a time when Viva Piñata was being touted as one of the fledgling Xbox 360’s key franchises, complete with a tie-in television series. In the end, it did not go down in history as anything like a game-changer, let alone a Rare classic on the level of the studio’s earlier hits. Even so, its colourful visuals and relatively unusual premise as a life-and-gardening simulation left a sufficiently positive impression on both reviewers and players. In fact, the response was warm enough for Rare to produce a sequel, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, which allowed the developers to implement ideas that time pressure had forced them to abandon in the first game.

The story of how the music for Viva Piñata ended up in Grant Kirkhope’s hands is a fairly typical Rare story, with composers juggling multiple projects and trading responsibilities along the way. Initially, Steve Burke had been assigned to score Viva Piñata, while Kirkhope was handling sound design. Once Burke became more heavily occupied with Kameo: Elements of Power, however, Kirkhope was asked to take over the music as well. In the process, he drew on material previously composed for Rare’s aborted Nintendo 64 project Dream, which would later evolve into Banjo-Kazooie.

For Kirkhope, the assignment was something close to ideal, so much so that he later named the Viva Piñata scores among his favourite works. First, he was given the chance to record with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the foremost ensembles for film and game music. The experience clearly meant a great deal to him; hearing the orchestra play his music reportedly moved him to tears. More importantly still, the project was perfectly suited to his own musical inclinations. As Kirkhope put it, this was “one of those rare occasions where the music I most like to write suited the game perfectly”. That meant melody-driven music shaped by what he described as “that kind of Elgar / Vaughan Williams sound” – a strain of English twentieth-century pastoralism that Viva Piñata gave him full licence to indulge.

And indeed, what is immediately striking about Viva Piñata and its sequel score is simply how beautiful Kirkhope’s melodies are. Since Trouble in Paradise feels more like an extension than a true sequel, both soundtracks can reasonably be treated as one large work here. Few game soundtracks pursue melody with such single-minded devotion, and fewer still contain such a wealth of lovely tunes. True, the lack of pronounced thematic links between cues means that the music has relatively little cohesion beyond its all-pervasive pastoral mood. At the same time, this also ensures that each track introduces fresh melodic material. Kirkhope knows exactly what atmosphere he wants to sustain: the entire Viva Piñata soundtrack plays like an exercise in writing the most serene, idyllic orchestral music imaginable.

A great deal of the soundtrack’s charm also lies in its beguiling orchestrations. Kirkhope entrusts most of his melodies to solo woodwinds, proving himself unusually adept at writing for a family of instruments too often sidelined in game scoring. The soloists all acquit themselves beautifully, with sensitive, graceful playing that draws out the quiet but deeply felt emotions in each piece. Significant credit is due here to orchestrator Nic Raine as well. Listen closely to “All in a Day’s Work”, which in essence reworks the same melody line again and again. Yet by passing it around the woodwind section, the tune never grows stale and instead keeps enticing the listener through carefully varied timbres.

Interestingly, despite the opportunity to work with a full orchestra, Kirkhope keeps the accompaniments relatively simple, generally providing a warm cushion beneath the melodies rather than building elaborate symphonic structures around them. There is not much counterpoint in Viva Piñata; only occasionally do the solo lines intertwine to produce a more intimate, chamber-like effect. In terms of raw material, then, this is rather sparse music dressed in lush, swooning colours. Kirkhope’s classical models are reflected less in structural procedure than in general mood. The cues do not usually develop towards any strong goal. Instead, they revel in a kind of blissful stasis, meandering from one melodic highlight to the next. It is the slightly longer tracks, such as “Warm Heart, Cold Nose” and “Tomorrow’s Wonders”, that become particular standouts, because they have more room to generate a little emotional complexity through more varied development.

Anyone suspecting that there is little genuine conflict or tension in the Viva Piñata soundtrack would be entirely right. Although the game has antagonistic creatures, they seem to receive no real musical characterisation; the fleeting minor-key shading in “Night 1” almost counts as a major dramatic event. In lesser hands, this lack of contrast could easily have produced ninety minutes of monotony. Yet Kirkhope’s melodic gifts keep the music buoyant throughout. It also helps that many of the themes, despite their calm surface, possess a gentle forward motion. Sometimes they almost bounce along, underscoring the mischievous charm of the piñata creatures themselves. Delicately accented string figures occasionally lend the music a trace of folk-dance movement.

And while the overall emotional register of the soundtrack never changes all that much, Kirkhope and Raine do make a few instrumental adjustments to give the score some expressive variation. Interestingly, the desert cues are not especially distinct from the rest of the album, aside from the occasional chromatic touch. It is the music for icy regions and nocturnal settings that introduces something genuinely new. As expected, these pieces become more wispy and ethereal, moving away from the warm earthiness of most of the score. Textures thin out further, solo instruments become even more prominent, and new colours appear through solo cello and female choir.

The resulting music is slightly more elusive than what one usually hears elsewhere on the album, tinged with mystery and otherworldliness in a way that contrasts nicely with the emotional directness of the daytime cues. Most importantly, these more suspended, lingering pieces express a yearning and hushed awe before nature’s beauty that make them the score’s most moving moments. Kirkhope singled out “Bedtime Story” as his favourite composition from his time at Rare, and it is easy to understand why. Very few soundtracks contain a melody as dreamy, peaceful, and quietly exquisite as this one, while still suggesting the wonders of the nightly world beyond the window. If there is a game soundtrack capable of winning over both young children and listeners devoted to pastoral orchestral music, it is Viva Piñata.