From the Concert Hall to the Console: Three 8-Bit Translations of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Abstract:Thanks to frequent appearances in film and television throughout the twentieth century, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor has developed powerful significations ranging from the pious to the grotesque. The Toccata and Fugue is emblematic of the pipe organ’s power and majesty, frequently used in horror films and other media to convey that which is gothic and grand. The Toccata and Fugue is also featured in a number of video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Although it still often evokes the macabre, the work’s signifying function shifts in video games. The interactivity of the medium and the combination of the music with seemingly incongruous settings such as ancient Greek temples and alien planets make it more difficult to discern the relationship between music and the image onscreen.This shifting meaning is produced not only by the audiovisual context, but also by how the work is transformed to fit the sound capabilities of the NES’s hardware. The use of the Toccata and Fugue allowed game designers instant access to a bank of culturally conferred extramusical meanings, while still allowing room for artistic license in creating the work anew via what I have identified as three forms of quotation: synthesis, juxtaposition, and mistranslation. These quotations of the Toccata and Fugue range from momentary snippets of the original inserted into newly composed music (synthesis), to truncated, albeit faithful, re-creations in bizarre settings (juxtaposition), to hastily condensed versions riddled with chromatic and contrapuntal inaccuracies (mistranslation)—the last of which I discovered through transcription of the original audio files into Western musical notation. In this article, I argue that it is, intriguingly, the moments of error that are the most interesting and potentially powerful, giving the player agency to create their own meanings through mistranslation.