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 Mark McKenzie
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." — CD note

Music of the Spheres was the musical foundation for the music of 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 48 minutes.

Track List

1. The Path - Moon - Key of C

2. The Union - Mercury - Key of D

3. The Ruin - Venus - Key of E

4. The Tribulation - Sun - Key of F-sharp

5. The Rose - Mars - Key of G

6. The Ecstacy - Jupiter - Key of A

7. The Prison - Saturn - Key of B-flat

8. The Hope - Earth - Key of C

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". He wrote music that "told its own story", and would be released before the full game to introduce people to the music of Destiny. He 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. O'Donnell's last inspiration for the work was the Lydian B7 musical scale, which gave every piece a specific key it was written in.

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 a vinyl soundtrack collection.

Legacy

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.