Game Music Concerts Spread Gamer Culture 75
The Escapist, this week, is all about game music. A featured article by Kyle Orland touches on the phenomenon of game music concerts. That they're popular with gamers is unsurprising, but the piece also discusses the ways in which these events can make non-gamers aware of gaming's unique culture. From the article: "The most e-mails we get, oddly enough, after a show, will be from the mom who brought the neighborhood kids or the grandmother who brought the grandson or the girlfriend who got dragged there by the boyfriend. Those are the letters we get that go 'Wow, I never knew that videogame music was this powerful. I never knew that the graphics were this amazing. Thank you for turning me on to this thing. I get it now.'"
Re:Spreading the love... (Score:3, Informative)
You did mention the best one if you want to get people interested in them, and that is probably Relics of the Chozo, the full album based on Metroid music. It is absoloutly beautiful.
I admit I havn't poked around much at OCR recently (I really should), and there are probably soem new stunners like Relics out there now.
The article is about somethign I had not previously known about. Full symphany productions with only video game music. Sure I have seen the ocasional joke where everyone launches in to the SMB theme, but rarely anything else. And yah, SMB by a symphony is fun, but it isn't really that interesting to non-gamers, where as a live performance of alot of the RPG titles WOULD be interesting.
I seriusly need to get some tickets to one of these performances.
Re:Spreading the love... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Drag people in the theatres by lowering standar (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. But partially, this is an error in terminology. "Classical" music, technically refers to a period of about 75 years of western art music in the 18th century that basically stems from Hydan to Mozart. Bach is the tail end of the Baroque era, and Beethoven is basically the grandfather of the Romantic movement, which turned its back on the black & white philosophies of the classical era. Unfortunately, we've used the term "classical" to refer to ALL western art music from the Baroque era forward. Many times, it's not a problem, but it does betray a certain elitist ideal toward a certain, very dated, era of western art music, that holds mathamatics above all else, even creativity.
Modern orchestral cinema music, and by extension, orchestral game music, is largely post-romantic art music seen through the lens of neo-classicism, impressionism, expressionism, jazz, and classic rock. Very little of anything out of this past century can be directly owed to Bach, and even less can be owed to Mozart. Probably, least of all, in art music, which largely regards Mozart as a formula composer with about as much innovation as a dime novelist.
There is really very little difference between today's movie music, and the Opera of the 19th century, or the Ballet of the early 20th century, which makes up a significant portion of highly recieved art music. Collaborative and multimedia efforts are not a new thing. For almost as long as there has been music, there have been visual counterparts to accompany it, in some form or another. Sergei Diaghilev's commissioning of Stravinsky to compose the music to his ballet, "The Rite of Spring", is no different from Fritz Lang's commissioning of Sergei Prokofiev to compose the music for his movie "Alexander Nevsky", Tim Burton's comissioning of Danny Elfman to compose the music to "Edward Scissorhands", or Sakaguchi's comissioning of Nobuo Uematsu to compose the music for the game "Final Fantasy."
The fact that the scope of the production has changed has little effect on the composer, as it is still largely written by one composer, working directly in conjunction with one director. As for the audience? Well, today's world is simply yesterday's concert hall.
Even the arguement condemning cinematic music is no different from that of Brahms' disavowing of all music that has any visual or literary counterpart. You may agree with Brahms, but as long as you can accept the legitimacy of the ballet (a vast plurality of well-known 20th century compositions are from ballets) you should not have any trouble accepting the legitimacy of the cinema or game score.