Music of the Spheres

Music of the Spheres
Released:	June 1, 2018
Genre:	Classical Orchestra Video game soundtrack
Label:	Bungie Music Publishing
Producer(s):	Jonty Barnes Giles Martin
Composer(s):	Martin O'Donnell Michael Salvatori Paul McCartney
Performance:	Abbey Road Studios
Total length:	48:24

"For untold ages the Traveler sent signals from deep in the galaxy to our solar system, signals interpreted and identified by the subconscious mind of humanity as music. Music that tells a story about worlds yet to be experienced, places that don't yet exist. The message of the Traveler, along with the inner harmony amongst the seven spheres themselves, has inspired what you are about to hear."

— O'Donnell's CD note

Music of the Spheres was the musical foundation for Destiny written by Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori, and Paul McCartney, which started production in 2009 and was sent off to an orchestra in early 2012. The full version of its second movement, titled The Union, was performed live at Video Games Live 2013, and it was announced that Music of the Spheres would be released as a standalone work, having planned to be released in August 2014, one month before Destiny's final release date, to be kept with the composers' intention of a "musical prequel" to the full franchise. It consisted of eight movements and a total of forty-eight minutes.

Track List

1. The Path

2. The Union

3. The Ruin

4. The Tribulation

5. The Rose

6. The Ecstacy

7. The Prison

8. The Hope

Production

In late 2009, Bungie management came to composer Martin O'Donnell, asking him to write music for the game that would be called Destiny. He came up with a concept he described as "centuries old", which was "music for the sake of music". O'Donnell wrote music that "told its own story", and would be released before the full game to introduce people to the music of Destiny. O'Donnell worked on it with his colleague and musical-partner Michael Salvatori, and later recruited famed musician Paul McCartney to the project.

O'Donnell took inspiration from the ancient concept "Musica Universalis", or the idea that the seven spheres humanity knew about at the time moved in relation to music. O'Donnell also used nocturnal geomantic figures as the namesake for the individual tracks.

At E3 2013, publisher Activision reworked O'Donnell's audio for a trailer at the last minute. They replaced the music with "library music" and hired an unrelated voice actor for the narration. O'Donnell expressed his frustrations on Twitter, stating the music was not his own. O'Donnell was fired from Bungie on April 11. 2014. A legal battle with O'Donnell and Bungie's CEO-at-the-time Harold Ryan began shortly after. This court case was resolved on September 4th, 2015 in favor of O'Donnell.

Music of the Spheres remained unpublished for several years after, being made available on Bungie's own webstore on June 1, 2018 as part of The Music of Destiny, Volume 1 vinyl soundtrack collection.

Leak

Two months after the court suite was settled, a Bungie fan named Owen Spence (formerly known as u/OS_Epsilon at Destiny's Reddit page) began a project to reconstruct Music of the Spheres from publicly available material. After several months, Spence released a 40 minute cut to Reddit in April 2016, which impressed O'Donnell. Spence kept working on it for another year with the help of Spanish speaking fan Tlohtzin Espinosa. Spence and Espinosa's work was released in April 2017, called the "Definitive Edition". O'Donnell stated that while it was not quite "definitive", it was still close to the real work. After the release of the Definitive Edition, Spence found a way to get a cleaner version of a piece of audio Espinosa had failed to acquire. Spence spent a few days making the edit and YouTube channel Planet Destiny posted the final mock up release.

After the final release by Spence, O'Donnell went to Twitter and encouraged anyone who had a copy of Music of the Spheres to share it. A few days before Christmas 2017, Espinosa was contacted by someone who owned a real copy of Music of the Spheres, and he worked with Spence to release it on December 25, 2017. Many fans feared the legal ramifications this would lead to, but for four months, the leak remained online. In April 2018, Spence was contacted by Bungie and sent a Cease and Desist letter, which led to a fan outcry for the music. Bungie's community manager Cozmo23 responded to the backlash on Reddit by saying they were doing it so Bungie could officially release Music of the Spheres.

Poetry

During a trip to England, O'Donnell met a poet named Malcolm Guite at a festival on the Isle of Wight, where they had their first conversation about pre-Copernican astrophysics and C.S. Lewis. Quickly realizing they shared a passion for these ideas, O'Donnell asked Guite to write a collection of poems for Music of the Spheres. Guite wrote a collection of fourteen poems which he called Seven Heavens, Seven Hells; A Sequence for the Spheres and gave them to Bungie to read over. O'Donnell loved the poems and Bungie purchased the rights to them. Guite had his name for his poetry in the first Destiny game's credits.

As years passed and Music of the Spheres was seemingly not going to release, Guite considered putting Seven Heavens, Seven Hells into a number of his books, but an author whom Guite had admired, Michael Ward, said the poems didn't fit thematically into any of the collections he proposed. Seven Heavens, Seven Hells remained unpublished.

Shortly after Spence had leaked Music of the Spheres in December 2017, Spence and his friend Landon Davis acquired the poems, and started work on a collection called Music of the Spheres: Golden Age Anthology, which combined Seven Heavens, Seven Hells and other content related to Music of the Spheres into a package complete with art, videos, and audio. Their first video was released on July 7, 2018, and they stated they would release more once The Music of Destiny, Volume 1 vinyl collection shipped in late 2018 to those who purchased them.

In terms of the layout of the poetry, there are fourteen poems arranged in seven pairs. Each poem draws influences from Ward's book Planet Narnia, and the poems are arranged in a format called a roundel, where each poem has a main phrase that is repeated throughout (for instance, The Moon's phrase is "The Moon is Full).

Every two poems are 'opposing pairs'. According to Guite, "Each of the seven spheres has a certain cluster of associations and influences, Venus with Love, Mars with war and martial valour, the Sun with gold, but also poetry and inspiration etc. But equally it is possible for each of these celestial influences to become corrupted and malign, for, as St. Augustine says, good is primal and evil is always a corruption of some original good." As such, the first poem of the opposing pair is diurnal, or the 'heavenly' sphere, and the second in the pair is the nocturnal, or the 'hellish' sphere.

Poet Malcolm Guite in a Bungie Office

To help Guite better understand the world of Destiny, Joseph Staten gave Guite a list of phrases that summarized what Destiny was about. Guite was inspired by these phrases and wrote a fifteenth poem he called Earth's Enigmas. Guite wrote it without Bungie asking for it, so it was never used in the game. Earth's Enigmas was released by Guite, Spence, and Davis in a video on December 23, 2018.

Trivia

• The musical keys of the pieces goes in the order of the Lydian b7 scale (C, D, E, F#, G, A, Bb, C).
• At one point during development of the music, O'Donnell had the names of the geomantic figures encoded in binary. This was not used.
• Music of the Spheres was recorded in its entirety on November 23, 2012.
• Music of the Spheres was mixed and mastered by December 10, 2012.
• The intended shipping date of Music of the Spheres was in April 2013. The next window of release would have been August 2014. Neither windows happened.
• An alternate mix of Hope for the Future by Paul McCartney with a boys choir is part of Music of the Spheres.
• The trademark for the name Destiny: Music of the Spheres was abandoned on May 12, 2014.

Gallery

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  The three composers of Music of the Spheres

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  Recording session at Abbey Road Studios

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  From left to right, Michael Salvatori, Paul McCartney, and producer Giles Martin

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  Malcolm Guite recording his poetry