By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Welcome! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and among my credits as a game composer, I was delighted to compose the original soundtrack for the bestselling video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation. It was the first game from the popular Assassin’s Creed franchise to feature a female assassin. Creating a musical support for her awesome adventure was an immense privilege for me. In this series of articles, we’ve been exploring the composition process that I pursued for Assassin’s Creed Liberation, including how I used music to support the narrative by defining locations, reflecting cultural and historical influences, and emphasizing important ideas. If you’d like to catch up on the previous four articles, you can find them here:
- Cultural Fusion: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
- Time and Place: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
- Melodies as Symbols: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
- The Symbolism of Recurrence: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
Through initial theme and subsequent variation, music can carry ideas forward while keeping those concepts fresh as they undergo repetition. The theme and variation technique allows us as composers to create structure and unify a musical score, and this effect can operate with multiple themes. Together, these themes can form a sense of overall identity for a video game.
In the case of Assassin’s Creed Liberation, the theme for the protagonist’s father is a great example.
Aveline de Grandpré is the central character of Assassin’s Creed Liberation, and her father Philippe is a wealthy Frenchman with a successful shipping business. When we are first introduced to Philippe de Grandpré, he is at the top of his career. He’s considered to be an expert in his field. He lives in an impressive mansion in New Orleans, mixing and mingling amongst the most aristocratic members of New Orleans society. With his innate elegance and impeccable manners, Philippe is one of the best examples of the ideal gentleman of his time – always governed by well-tempered sophistication and considered restraint. He’s a product of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, and he essentially represents that culture in the game.
The Age of Enlightenment is famous for its celebration of both intellectualism and tolerance. It’s a philosophy focused on always doing what’s right and just, according to a purely rational point of view. With that in mind, Philippe could be seen as the embodiment of that European idealized society. That was the way I thought about Philippe’s theme while I was writing it. In my mind, Philippe’s theme was an expression of Philippe’s personality, but it could also be more generally associated with the privileged society from which he came. The music essentially expresses both Philippe’s character and his ideals. I composed the first version of the melody for Father’s Theme so that it would adhere to an 18th century Baroque tradition, complete with all the ornamentation you’d expect from that. Let’s listen to that theme in one of the game’s cinemas.
Like the other themes, Father’s Theme appears throughout the game, going through successive variations as it does so. Here’s how it sounds when it appears as the music for a high society party.
In this version, I’ve changed the meter, the tempo and the key, but I’ve still kept it firmly in the Baroque musical style. Moreover, the melody from Father’s Theme is still easily discernible. Using Father’s Theme during this lavish party connects that event to the previous dinner table scene – letting us know that we’re still navigating the upper echelons of society.
This isn’t the only other time that we hear Father’s Theme. It also appears during an important action sequence. Aveline is protecting her home city of New Orleans against a corrupt Spanish governor, so the concepts of honor and obligation that are a part of Father’s Theme seemed appropriate. Also, since the action sequence is a carriage chase through the heart of New Orleans, why shouldn’t the theme for such an action sequence be the most aristocratic theme in the game?
When we think of Aveline’s father as a symbol as well as a person, his musical theme becomes useful in ways beyond a simple illustration of his character. The same could be true for any character – but especially for the main character herself.
In the next installment, we’ll be discussing Aveline’s theme, and how her motif was carried into multiple variations throughout the Assassin’s Creed Liberation Score. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article! You’ll find further discussion of game music composition in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. Thanks for reading!
Winifred Phillips is a video game composer known for her Grammy® Award-Winning original musical score for the video game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (listen to the official soundtrack on Spotify). Her Wizardry soundtrack has also won a Society of Composers & Lyricists Award. Phillips is known for composing music for games in many of the most famous and popular franchises in gaming: Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, LittleBigPlanet, Lineage, Jurassic World, and Wizardry. Her music for Sackboy: A Big Adventure garnered a BAFTA Award nomination. Phillips’ other awards include the D.I.C.E. Award, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards (including Music of the Year), and four Hollywood Music in Media Awards. She is the author of the award-winning bestseller A COMPOSER’S GUIDE TO GAME MUSIC, published by the MIT Press. An interview with her has been published as a part of the Routledge text, Women’s Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound, which collects the viewpoints of the most esteemed female composers in film, television, and games. Follow her on Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.