One Year Later — On Continuing And Concluding the Score to Celeste
The Empty Space Above
I know what you’re thinking, “conclude” sounds like a weird way to describe writing the score to a free add-on chapter for a game. Celeste, as a narrative, is a self-contained thing. The score, too, is its own self-contained work that ends with the credits theme. But as an experience, Celeste became far more than I had anticipated and needed its own special mindset to write something new for.
(A note: this blog post that is ostensibly going to go into my thoughts on writing the score to Farewell is starting on a slightly more existential note, but I feel like context always helps explain my own process.)
I’ve told this story a few times in interviews, but up until the point that we actually released the game, I had no idea Celeste was going to be such an initial-capped & italicized Thing. I knew it was really dang good, I was proud of it and beyond excited to share my first big project since going full-time composer, but even the day-one reception pulled the rug out from under me.
In the time between shipping Celeste and beginning development on Farewell, the team and I had received so many positive emails, messages, award nominations, and even some wins. It was an impossible expectation to live up to when beginning something new, and so I began in the only way I knew would help me get started: by subverting those expectations and trying something different.
Before that, however, I also took the downtime to write an album called Oneknowing. While it was primarily a solo endeavor, I teamed up with an amazing violinist named Michaela Nachtigall, who you might know from her creative Otamatone covers on YouTube. While she primarily played a very subdued and sustained muted sound for the solo album, I wanted to write something a bit more expressive for her. After proposing the idea to the team & being met with very enthusiastic agreement, I added a new major sound to the Celeste palette: strings.
Last Steps
While on the “new things” campaign, I wanted to begin the Farewell chapter with something that was very rare in Celeste proper: Silence.
This is also my first and last warning that, if you want to remain unspoiled on Farewell, please go ahead and play as much as you’d like before reading on, because I will be going into a number of the themes and influences for the chapter’s story, which are best experienced in context first.
When you enter Chapter 9, however, there’s no music in a space where there’s always been something, whether it’s an ambient pad or a few scattered piano notes. Again, breaking from expectations.
When music does begin, it’s after the new story has begun to unfold: Granny is gone, but her bird isn’t, and so Madeline needs to find out why. She heads into space, and immediately we’re introduced to another new sound. Because Madeline is leaving her known reality in search of something she’s lost, I wanted to disorient more than rely on familiar “Celeste-like” sounds.
For the purposes of this analysis, you can count on the piano, guitar, and classic game-inspired synths as the pillars of “familiar” sounds.
Because “synths” is a huge category to exclude, I wanted to find a new collection of unusual sounds to use. Luckily, I had just picked up an odd sample library during Spitfire Audio’s holiday sale called Glass and Steel, which consists of (sorry if this seems obvious) glass and steel objects, struck, brushed, and manipulated in other ways to create a wide variety of neat sounds. So I took a few of these textures and began to build the aesthetic of the first piece of background music, Fear Of The Unknown.
In this piece, I introduce two new melodic ideas, which form 2/3rds of what I’d use as new material for the chapter:
What I’ll call the Bird’s Theme is introduced by our first new acoustic instrument, Michaela’s violin, playing in one section of the track. It’s a simple theme that mostly winds around the chord changes, but is my attempt to illustrate the bird’s flight away from Madeline and into the unknown.
Paired with this theme is a motif played on piano that represents Madeline’s grief or fear. In a way, it’s like the inverse of her theme. While you might think of Badeline’s theme as an inverse, like the character herself they’re more related and mirrored than what this motif does. (Note that, while I refer to her as Badeline out of convenience, I mean Madeline’s Part of Herself, and that Badeline isn’t her official name. But y’know, convenience.) While Madeline’s theme is an ascent up the mountain, Madeline’s grief is a descent, with a diminished 5th at its lowest, sinking her into a pit she will need to recover from.
Like most of the music in Celeste, Fear Of The Unknown goes through a transformation half-way through. When you turn off the electricity that courses through the odd underwater-like space above the mountain, so too disappear the drum loops and synths, leaving only the acoustic instruments to continue. It’s a bit on-the-nose when it comes to transitions, but it’s one I thought would be pretty fun.
Development
It isn’t until Madeline spots the bird making a big ascent and unlocks the way to give chase that the music takes its first big shift in tone. While there’s no dialogue to back up the tonal shift, I wanted the score to continue to reflect not just the chapter’s vibe, but Madeline’s inner thoughts as well. So as she gives chase, the scene brightens, and her mind turns to more optimistic thoughts.
Joy Of Remembrance sees the return of not just the violin, but a full string trio accompanied by Madeline’s piano. (Michaela is also joined by the amazingly talented SungHa Hong on Cello.) In this piece, the 3rd new theme is introduced: Granny’s Theme. Instead of just stating it outright, I wanted to have some fun with it and created a 5-part theme and variation that comprises the majority of the piece. It’s cyclical, in turns optimistic, meandering, dark, and ever repeating. The last section sees the return of the Bird’s Theme, grounding the chase, and setting it up to loop one more time.
As Madeline progresses, the influence of the mountain grows, synths begin adding into the ensemble, until she reaches what should be the end.
The heart should be the end, but Madeline continues to push beyond. To score this sense of stasis, I took the heart collection chord sustain (created by our sound designer Kevin, thanks Kevin!) and actually sampled it to build an entirely new piece of music around it. In a slightly sneaky variation, the piano plays a somewhat inverted and rearranged version of Madeline’s Grief. While it isn’t the exact phrase, the structure is there in some way to evoke a sort of meandering process, transforming the grief into something new.
Armed with the newfound tools to resume her bird chase, Madeline tries and fails to catch the bird. But she’s determined. So begins Beyond The Heart, and the second of what ends up being a trilogy of end runs. I wanted to pull out all the stops for this track and forgo dynamic progression in favor of just creating a really satisfying jam.
This is, for most people familiar with the original score, the return of the traditional Celeste sound. I even brought back the same synth lead I used in the chase portion of Resurrections. The strings are back, too, and I reached out to the super talented percussionist Doug Perry (who also recorded percussion for me on Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns!) to play the layered & polyrhythmic kit/snare/cymbal parts.
(As some inside baseball, I actually wrote this track thinking it would be the finale for the chapter. Spoilers: it isn’t, but I pulled out all the stops, and then had to think really hard about how to out-do myself.)
Either way, the gang’s all here, and so melodically the piece includes all of the thematic material established to this point. Granny’s Theme is the primary melody, with a sneaky statement of Madeline’s Theme (or is it Badeline?). You might also notice Madeline’s Grief transforms yet again, into a determined statement, kicking off the piece. In the B section, there’s a further exploration of Badeline’s theme, far-away, left behind in defiance. More on that later.
It isn’t until Badeline finally catches up, and tries to directly confront Madeline about her choices, that the triumphant end run gives way to an unsettling darkness.
Into the Darkness
In Final Defiance, the tone shift was a necessity when considering the gameplay constraints that it needed to hold to. In previous chapters, we’d created rhythmic block rooms that usually contained B-Side cassettes or provided the final challenge for the B-Sides themselves. Because Farewell has no B or C sides, the rhythm block rooms are a direct part of the progression. However, suddenly having a burst of upbeat chiptune felt so outside of where I wanted to be, tonally. So instead, I wrote an ambient arrhythmic progression out of a pad that was generated using sustained string playing. Paired with this, is a flexible rhythm for acoustic percussion and sparse piano, that still follows the rhythm of the room. It ended up being a totally modular piece, where how you play and when you enter the room, actually determines how the piece plays back.
And then the turning point. The piece Reconciliation mashes up the Bird’s Theme with Badeline’s Theme, a point of discussion where Madeline finally listens to herself and comes to a conclusion about how to move on.
Farewell, then, the titular track from the release, is a piece of music about collaboration and moving on together. I never knew I needed to write this piece of music, but looking at the overall narrative of both the game, and what Celeste has meant to me outside the game, it made sense both from a narrative perspective, and a personal one. Farewell is not just Madeline moving on, but the process through which I was able to move on too. It’s hanging up my metaphoric hat, and writing one last 8-minute piece to go out on.
Music Structure as Game Design
The first thing that I realized about writing this piece was that I had to approach it with stamina in mind. At this point, players will have been going through some of the most challenging levels they’ve ever played in the game. They’re about to face the most challenging levels in the game, period. Not only will people be hearing this music a lot, they’ll be hearing it a lot as they die over and over again trying to reach the end. And so I collaborated with Matt’s level design to come up with a music blueprint that best accommodated what they were creating:
- The music needed a significant progression, to reward players as they reached notable milestones in the final run.
- For players playing flawlessly, the music needed to feel like it was progressing naturally from section to section without skipping any parts of the track.
- For speedrunners going through literally as fast as possible, I wanted the music to still feel satisfying and come to its climax naturally.
As it happened, while I was writing, Matt was designing levels, and eventually we settled on a progression that was about 8 minutes give or take. So if you played through the end run flawlessly, an 8 minute piece of music would play through from start to finish.
Then, I divided the progression into four 2-minute loops. So not only was it an 8-minute track that built and developed, but it would also be able to loop internally, while still reaching each new section seamlessly.
Finally, to accommodate speedrunners doing it way faster than 8 minutes, we put a fail-safe in the scripting that checks your progression in the levels compared to what section of the track is playing. If you’ve blasted past the approximate timing, it’ll seamlessly transition to the final section early so that it will always line up with the last few screens.
Anyway that’s just the structure of the composition.
For the melodic content, I wanted each section to represent one aspect of the collaboration and partnership being represented in the gameplay. Madeline is being helped not just by Badeline, now, but the Bird as well.
In the A section, I took Badeline’s Theme and gave it to the electric bass. For the first time, her other part is the foundation, supporting her on the final leg of this adventure.
In the B section, Madeline’s Theme is played against the minor chord progression, starting her melody’s journey from the minor 3rd instead of the root of the chord; a bit of a boost up.
In the C section, the violin returns with the Bird’s Theme, flavoring the whole thing with a bit of determined melancholy, a plea for help to push on to the beyond.
In the D section, the grand finale, I tried something new to close out the theme of collaboration: I combined all three themes into one single melody. This character megatheme starts with Badeline, continues into Madeline, and ends up in the Bird’s theme, pushing ever forward. Each melodic fragment also begins on each sequential note in the minor triad that the progression is built on.
Eventually, two synths and the violin play all three themes simultaneously, layered on top of each other, before improvising with the thematic material. I had a blast not just figuring out this progression, but exchanging back and forth with Michaela to create something that felt really natural and an extension of the themes I wanted to embody.
Winding Down
The final two tracks that accompany the last cutscenes are the final sense of closure with how the Bird & Granny’s themes evolve over the course of the chapter’s story.
In The Woman And The Bird, the Bird’s Theme is given a Major variation to accompany Madeline’s final exchange with Granny before waking.
In Vovô e Vovó, Theo’s theme returns to lead into what I imagined as his grandpa’s rendition of Granny’s theme, something she might have heard him playing all those years ago, on their own ascent up the mountain.
Final Thoughts
When I began writing the music for Celeste, I was a full-time game designer moonlighting as a composer. Now that I’ve closed the book on this amazing game and all the places (both emotionally and geographically) that it’s taken me, I’m a full-time composer, producer, mixing engineer, writer…let’s just call that Creative Person.
Celeste opened doors for me that I’ve already stepped through, and my professional life is wholly different as a result. There’s no real denying that it’s created change for everything that is yet to come for me, and so it only made sense that I’d conclude Celeste by changing it, too. The soundtrack to Farewell might be off-putting on first listen, and I don’t know if people will like it less, as much, or more than what I wrote first. It’s impossible to live up to high expectations, so I did what I always do: try to stay true to what kind of story I want to express, and what emotions that brings out. I hope that worked.
Enjoy, and see you on the next project ❤
