Music journalist Rebecca
Armstrong observed back in 2011 that video game music has come a long way from the sort of music you
heard in the early days, ‘a series of bleeps
accompanying pixilated figures on screen’. You can believe it when you hear the
sort of full-blown orchestral score that is excerpted in video games concerts.
No-one who manages orchestras
needs to be told how successful video game concerts are. The administrators have
seen the new kind of audience drawn to them: the fans going nuts when they
recognise the theme from ‘Zelda’; the rapturous applause from a full house for
the second flute who has possibly never before had audience members scream for his/her
solo.
Video Games concerts have
even had their own evolution. What started out as a concert devoted to the
music of one game, say Final Fantasy
or The Legend of Zelda, has evolved
into a more fluid structure drawing on an ever-increasing pool of excerpts (the
beginnings of a repertoire perhaps?) Not that all the music presented in games
concerts was originally conceived for orchestra, but this is increasingly the
case. Indeed, video game music is a genuine new genre for orchestral composers.
What intrigues me though is what it tells us about orchestras and what it might
mean for orchestras long-term. Los Angeles is one of the centres of game
creation and there is no shortage of people to ask.
Admittedly, I once assumed
that video games were just outlets for violence - and you do come across games
described as ‘an action-adventure third-person shooter video game’ or
‘containing melee combat’ - but I’d never realised the range of cultural
references they might embrace. Assassin’s
Creed, for example, is based on a 1938 Slovenian novel by Vladimir Bartol
which was dedicated, ironically, to Benito Mussolini. Journey, whose composer Austin Wintory I interviewed for this
article, ends with a song whose phrases come from the Aeneid, Iliad, Beowulf, Bashō and Joan of Arc. On a
YouTube playthrough of the score, Wintory posts a comment saying he was amazed
how much conversation there was on one of the producer company’s forums trying
to identify these texts.
 |
| Video games in concert, with flautist Sara Andon. Photo courtesy of Austin Wintory |
Perhaps I am most struck by
how many games are modelled on the hero’s journey as outlined by Joseph
Campbell in his 1949 book, The Hero With
a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell is a name you hear a lot in Los Angeles.
He seems to be cited by every second film worker (and that includes musicians) from
one side of Los Angeles to the other and his ‘monomyth’ can be discerned
beneath movies as diverse as Star Wars
and The Cider-House Rules (or even
operas like The Magic Flute and Parsifal). In so many video games, even
those that look like nothing more than splatting bad guys, the gamers
themselves are often replicating a hero’s journey. Of course, they may ‘die’
and not get to the ‘inmost cave’ to find ‘the elixir’ (to use ‘heroic’
terminology). But I suppose that’s how video games resonate with life.
So might I be proposing a
high cultural value for video games? Is this why orchestras have been brought
in? Australian conductor Brett Kelly proposes that video game employment of
orchestras is trying to draw on a ‘sense of cultural profundity’. I asked Bruce
Broughton, the composer of the first video game score conceived for orchestra,
how the score for Heart of Darkness (1998)
came about:
Because
Heart of Darkness was an early video game, it was somewhat different
from contemporary games. It contained a 30-minute animated film, the
narrative of which was interrupted by game sequences. In the game/story
the hero would come to a crisis, which could be only solved by the gamer.
Once the solution was revealed, the story - the film - continued. Essentially
I was writing music for a 30-minute animated film interspersed with game
sequences, the music for which I wasn’t responsible. The game’s producers liked the Disney film The Rescuers Down Under and particularly
liked the score, so they contacted me to see whether I would be interested in
doing their game. I had never done a game before, and it sounded like
fun. So, my answer was ‘Of course I would.’
I
asked Broughton, whose brother Bill is an Adelaide-based musician, what he thought an orchestra brought to the experience
of the game. ‘An orchestra,’ he says, ‘has
emotional depth at its heart. I have to think that that quality helped the
animation; the story and the game become more involving and entertaining.’
Austin
Wintory, composer of Journey, the
first game score to be nominated for a Grammy, echoed this view when I phoned
him at his studio in Burbank. ‘It’s the
expressive depth and potential of the orchestra. The symphony orchestra is one
of the greatest artistic achievements in human history. It has an inherent
emotional communicability that fits naturally within the vocabulary of most
games and most films.’
Actually, Journey was an eye-opener for me. Not
violent at all, the player undertakes a mystical journey across desert (and
stunningly beautiful graphics) to a mountain. It’s almost a meditative
experience, supported by music which is essentially a cello rhapsody
accompanied by bass flute, serpent (yes, the old medieval instrument) and
strings (in this case, the Macedonian Radio Symphony Orchestra).
Video Games concerts have
been such a boon for orchestras that an instinctive doubt creeps in. Will they
run their course? Will this good news story come to an end? And, while gamers
are currently providing a bump for orchestras at the box office, will they migrate
to what orchestras consider their main business: the perpetuation of the
classical repertoire?
There’s no doubting the
enthusiasm for video game music. Derek Raycroft runs an online radio program on
live365.com ‘dedicated to playing symphonic music of film, video games,
television, and more’ (http://www.live365.com/stations/djraycroft). When we
meet in North Hollywood he rattles off a new list of Essential Listening for me
– Garry Schyman (Bioschock), Brian
Tyler (Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag),
Michael Giacchino (Medal of Honor: Allied
Assault). I’d heard of Giacchino before. He wrote a highly energetic score
for the 2004 animated feature The
Incredibles. What’s also interesting is that I’m skipping the game and
going straight to the music.
But the orchestra’s core
business for 100 years plus has been the presentation of music that is to be
enjoyed for its own artful elaboration. ‘And what people are mostly looking for
in video games concerts,’ says conductor Jeffrey Schindler, ‘is reliving an experience.’
Schindler wonders how tolerant game enthusiasts will be of ‘variations of
interpretation, of tempo’. The people who go to these sorts of concerts ‘know
how this music goes on the original soundtrack.’ When gamers hear the Halo Suite, says Raycroft, ‘everybody
will go nuts for that because it’s so memorable. These video tracks that the
concert organisers are choosing are memorable to the players and when they
listen to them, it’s instant nostalgia to them.’
There is always, of
course, the possibility of video games nurturing an audience that will then
follow a composer into the concert hall. Austin Wintory talks of the gamers who
came to hear Woven Variations, the fantasia
for cello and orchestra that he derived from his music for Journey. They certainly accepted, even enthusiastically, the change
of medium. And likewise, he says, ‘I had season ticket subscribers come up and
say I’m going to buy this game.’ (Wintory tells of Woven Variations influencing the Journey game: ‘We were struggling at the time with kind of a big,
cathartic, grand finale. And it was not landing and we were trying different
things, mainly just getting bigger and bigger. Then virtually all the studio
attended the premiere of Woven Light
and I got a call the next day from the game’s creator Jenova Chen saying, “We
think you’ve solved the end of the game”. It kind of metastasized. The ending
of the game was inspired by the ending of this piece of music.’)
And what if video games
are a new way for composers to enrich their musical palette? Broughton mentions
at least one technique that he might
incorporate into his other writing. ‘When I worked on the animated series Tiny
Toon Adventures, I learned to make very quick transitions and modulations.
It’s not a technique I need often, but if I ever do, I know how to do it.’
There are possibly quite a
few people invested in the future of classical music who bemoan the fact that much of the music composed
for video games is what could be described as a film composer’s digest of
Richard Strauss, Mahler, Wagner, early Stravinsky, Holst of The Planets, or Orff of Carmina burana. The language almost
supports mid 20th-century critic Henry Pleasants’ contention that audiences
and classical repertoire parted company sometime around Wozzeck’s premiere in 1925. But there is another clue: all the
composers cited above take the audience on an adventure. It may not be the sort
of participatory adventure you get from playing the game, but perhaps, as
Schindler says, even if people ‘aren’t looking for the meaning of life, they’re
looking for an experience of living.’
As the music in games increasingly
becomes a plot device – and there are signs that it is – will an audience
develop that is knowledgeable about video game music in a way that nurtures
concert culture? What if there is an orchestral answer to Guitar Hero in which a gamer can make decisions about orchestral performances
in such a way that they develop their own opinions of tempo and interpretation?
Pie in the sky, perhaps. But somehow I doubt that video games will cease to
offer classical music possibilities after games concerts per se have run their course.
The answer may lie in
keeping the channels of communication open and allowing the symbiosis to gather
force. ‘Part of the problem,’ says Austin Wintory, ‘is that listeners and
musicians alike put everything into categories. I think that orchestral
musicians who command the most powerful emotional arsenal in the musical
landscape need not limit themselves the way they do. I would love to go to a
concert where the first thing on the program is Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun; next, wham, the hunt sequence
from Jerry Goldsmith’s Planet of the Apes.
Then, as soon as the dust is settled, say, Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica celestis or the Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings and then from that something
from Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy VII
which hearkens back a little bit to Faun.
Here is music, not classical music but music.’
It could be an adventure,
too.
Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013
This article first appeared in The Podium, the e-newlsetter of Symphony Services International, in Dec 2013.
