Bonus Chapter: Games and Multimedia

I wasn't originally planning to write about video games and multimedia. I wasn't sure what exactly video game music had to offer beyond an epic film score, and fans who were moved by the music mainly referenced how the music reminded them of a point in the game. Could it really stand alone like, say, the suite to Lord of the Rings? But video games have fast become one of the most sought-after fields for new composers, and multimedia opens new possibilities for both the creation and interpretation of classical music, as we will see.

There has, of course, been notable music in video games for decades—from Tetris and Super Mario to Zelda and Final Fantasy. But recently, as technical constraints have dissolved and games have leaned into sophisticated storytelling and world-building, more and more classical composers have gravitated towards writing game music, and symphonies and performers have begun programming standalone suites of gaming music.

There is much in common between video game music and the music we've already seen. Nobuo Uematsu's One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII fits right at home next to the Rite of Spring from the Ballet chapter and Carmina Burana from the Film chapter, each composed 90+ years ago.

So this chapter will start with the explicit storytelling of video games and move towards increasingly abstract works—but still with a visual component.

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of Journey by Austin Wintory, with his own commentary.

I don't know this game—it was a recommendation; I just know the music is played fairly often as a concert suite by itself—and so I'm listening to the soundtrack as an independent piece of music accompanied by Wintory's still visuals and narrating my response as a very honest first listen.

Immediately it's beautiful, even before I have time to be more specific than that. The opening cello and flute soloists sound like an introduction to our protagonists, experiencing some sort of longing and hardship; the visuals put me in a remote, harsh land like Tatooine; the large orchestral crescendo that overtakes the soloists reminds me of Adams' Scheherezade.2 from a few chapters back, in which Scheherezade is suffocated by the world around her. And the way it cuts at the end makes me feel like I've been left behind.

Now I'm going to watch some gameplay to see how my interpretation holds up. It's a really beautiful game, with much less plot than I was expecting, just a robed figure walking around the desert. The game (and the music) provides fairly few “events”—it's mostly atmospheric, almost meditative. It seems aptly named—being about the journey, rather than the destination.

In fact, it's not exactly what I was expecting from the drama of that opening moment, but now having seen the game, I can re-interpret it. The opening music sets up a main character, the cello, the feeling of loneliness, and the promise of a friend—the flute player. It turns out that the part of the game that sticks with its players is meeting another person playing the game that you can only communicate with via a single musical chirp, and joining them on the journey. I will say that this context does change my experience of the music. It then makes the ending of the suite more bittersweet for reaching the top of the mountain but leaving someone rather than just leaving the game.

We haven't focused so much on meditative, atmospheric music so far in this book, being focused primarily on character and event and less on the feeling of “being.” And I wasn't expecting to discuss it in this chapter, but in many ways it makes sense. The visual stimulus of multimedia makes it easier to stay inside of a moment without waiting for the next event. It looks like even concert productions of the Journey suite often have the game projected.

Thomas Adès' In Seven Days tells the creation story of the Genesis alongside a video installation from Tal Rosner.

The musical representation of the elements—sparkling stars, for instance—is made fairly obvious from the visuals—and in a longer work, the visuals are helpful for pointing out the changes, like when the brighter sun is introduced by the brass. But they really shine when the music is sitting and enjoying a specific sound. We think less about “when are we going to hear the sun” and take in the moment as if we were watching the actual night sky.

We can take that feeling with us when we listen to a purely musical composition like Alexina Louie's I Leap Through the Sky with Stars.

The pianistic representation of stars is pretty similar—light and pointillistic. But I think there's a way of imagining the visuals that can be applied to listening to this music. Like the stargazing, there is a seeming randomness to the dots overhead. A child lying on the grass looking up cannot easily discern the “why” of it all. And yet, they have no problem using their imagination to find patterns, shapes, and wonder in every minute that they're there, aware of every minuscule change, whether it be an airplane, a passing cloud, or, sometimes, a shooting star. Or perhaps you imagine yourself leaping through the sky. But when that event comes, the wonder is all the more wonderful for having waited, searching, dreaming.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the works of Andrew Norman—hyperkinetic, and requiring both performer and listener to be on the edge of their seat if they are to follow the music at all. Gran Turismo is not music for a video game, but actually classical music inspired by the racing game.

My first impression is that I notice that Norman's piece challenges the boundary between noise and music. Are the violin players' unintelligible sound-making noise, or is the humming engine of the car really music? And as with a car shifting gears, the more you listen to the Norman in full, the more that “unintelligible sound-making” begins to take form; you recognize patterns and variety, and what at first felt like a conglomeration of sound coalesces into an interplay between different textures that overlap and combine, all without losing Norman's motto of “Higher! Faster! Louder!”

The piece follows in the traditions of the perpetual motion string works of the Baroque period—but its subject matter is so modern that this relationship is only important to those who seek it out.

Norman's Play is even more of a game for the listener “and a hard one at that, to make sense of this crazy universe, at least at the onset, and that's part of the fun,” says Norman. It definitely helps to know the rules up front. The percussionists run the world. For instance, the triangle instrument represents a ▶️ play/pause button that freezes and unfreezes the musicians. The bongo makes people play backwards. The slapstick changes channels to switch to a different world and soundscape. “All with an eye and ear toward finding a way out of the labyrinth and on to some higher level.” Only in level 3 do the musicians find some freedom from the percussionists. The piece explores “who is playing whom” in the composer-conductor-orchestra-audience chain, with percussionists spending “a lot of their time and energy 'playing' the rest of the orchestra.”

Norman says, “I want to stretch your powers of perception, to throw you down a gauntlet of sound that sits on the edge of unintelligibility.” There seems to be a consensus among critics that you can really only decipher this at a live performance, and when you do it's mind-blowing. But we don't have that luxury, so, try at your own risk.

Ben Nobuto's Hallelujah Sim. is a much easier game for listeners to follow, which begins with the narrator giving a “step by step tutorial”:

Now for music that doesn't tell you what it's about. I can imagine people saying in previous chapters, “you already knew to interpret Mozart as operatic and Prokofiev as balletic, what about a piece you didn't know at all?” Can any lens be applied to any piece? So, here's a piece I don't know at all, the Poulenc Organ Concerto that struck me, somehow, as maybe game-like. Program notes for this piece mostly talk about how great people say it is, how it was commissioned by a princess who had romantic relationships with women, and its references to Bach, the Baroque era, and gothic architecture. None references a video game.

That moment of the organ entrance answered by the strings feels to me like something magical opening up in the midst of a dark dungeon (not at odds with the gothic interpretation). And when it comes back later, after dark magic from a witch's cauldron and winning battles amidst thunderclouds, momentum gathers as the light shines on the hero ready to conquer the world.

I could be crazy—certainly a major orchestra has never written program notes to this effect—but I think this interpretation is defensible, enough so to publish it in this book at least.

War, Peace

Amongst the music for video games, no theme is as “popular” as war. Here is a prototypical shooter soundtrack from Wilbert Roget in “Helldivers 2” that gets players pumped up like a John Williams Sunday Night Football theme:

And while so many video games romanticize war, there is no shortage of art that protests against it. Penderecki's orchestral work, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima is an immersive, multi-sensory experience by itself, devastating in its ability to recall—even re-enact—the atomic bomb, with sound alone.

This music is not easy to listen to—akin to the discord of the Andrew Norman music above, but without any of the “play.” To achieve its full effect, the audience must feel like they are trapped in a concert hall, unable to stop the music, or continue reading, or do something else. They must let the music surround and disturb them. If you choose to watch, please commit to at least the full 2 minute excerpt, don't stop after 10 seconds.

This piece actually started out as “absolute music”—the composer was just exploring different sounds he could produce. But after hearing an actual performance, Penderecki was struck by the “emotional charge” of the work—many listeners hear the violins “screaming”—and dedicated the piece to the residents and hibakusha who were killed or wounded in Hiroshima.

Steve Reich takes a still more literal approach in WTC 9/11, his response to the terrorist attacks in September 11th, 2001. It begins with the violins playing the sound of a phone being left off the hook and tape recordings from air traffic control. Written for just four string players, it is simultaneously intimate and tragic.

The Long Play

But it's the Adagio for Strings by American composer Samuel Barber that has been called the “world's saddest music.” I suppose it could be. It's been played at the funerals of Roosevelt and JFK, accompanies destruction in Platoon and a dignified death in The Elephant Man. But it holds tremendous hope at the same time as loss and holds light alongside darkness. Both are possible, and Barber stretches both to their limits, with the apex of the piece being not sound, but silence. It is for this reason that the Adagio's use as a response to 9/11 has become so moving, especially layered with video—an example of a piece of non-programmatic, absolute music applied to a specific situation. This performance is from American conductor Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Orchestra on September 15th, 2001.

The Armed Man

Sir Karl Jenkins takes these precise emotions—the loss and sorrow and hope and unity that we hear in Barber's Adagio—and elaborates on them in a long-form work. The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace intersperses settings of the Catholic Mass with texts from multiple traditions—with segues from the French folk song, “L'homme armé” (The armed man) into the Islamic call to prayer, Hindu Mahabharata, and Kipling's poetry. It starts in peacetime and shows us how war develops into an inevitability, and its horrors are told by a poet from Hiroshima.

Sometimes, a work starts out as pure music, but it resonates with artists or presenters who want to add video after the fact to convey their specific message through multiple media. Two separate films have been created to accompany the piece. One, called The Armed Boy takes the piece allegorically, telling the story of a young boy who is bullied and ultimately retaliates. The other reflects the text of the work, through war times, and the devastating aftermath when the guns finally stop. This brings us back to the Benedictus, a blessing that begins the healing process.

Following the Benedictus, the piece concludes with a line from Tennyson: “Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.”

The Rabbit Hole

Theodor Adorno said that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. But music has continued to grapple with war at different times and perspectives, and will continue to do so. Britten's War Requiem is one of the most colossal in scale, including a full orchestra, smaller chamber orchestra, full chorus, boys' choir, vocal soloists, & organ over 80 minutes, interweaving the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead with poems from Wilfred Owen. ^💬

Meanwhile, Blind Tom Wiggins', The Battle of Manassas goes so far as to narrate exactly what is happening in every part of the civil war's first battle as he manages to reproduce everything he heard. And Prokofiev wrote three so-called war sonatas during World War II, not to mention the opera, War and Peace set during the Napoleonic wars (based on Tolstoy).

But video game composers have added more on the subject in the last couple of decades at a rate unparalleled by the rest of classical composition. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra has a complete playlist of gaming music in live concert, featuring the classic scores of Eimear Noone's Halo and Bear McReary's God of War alongside Assassin's Creed, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and the list goes on. These all have sound-bite-able themes that can be enjoyed in isolation.

On the other hand, Sid Meier's Civilization tells the story of civilization throughout history, and is most impactful heard altogether. The Civilization IV soundtrack actually uses traditional classical music throughout time, while Civilization VI has an original soundtrack that serves the same purpose, each track representing a given civilization. Genshin Impact does something similar but in a fantasy world—as they expand to new regions over time they release its music, like the realm of tranquil eternity, the fire nation, or water nation.

In the style of Andrew Norman's energetic string writing, I'd point to the popular, genre-bending string quartets of Jessie Montgomery and Gabriella Smith—“Strum” and “Carrot Revolution” respectively. And for more like the Poulenc Organ Concerto, see his Concerto for Two Pianos, which I think you can also interpret as game-like music.

As for classical music that has multimedia added later, it's becoming increasingly common for presenters to add some sort of visualization, like you'd see in concerts of other genres like rock or pop. San Francisco Symphony's Soundbox does this with Pauchi Sasaki's Sanagi. Leyla Kabuli expands Fazil Say's “Black Earth”—a piano piece that imitates the Bağlama instrument about a poet whose homeland was reduced to nothing but black earth—with a video tribute to Syrian Refugees. Roderick Cox and the WDR Symphony Orchestra are accompanied by Iryna Bilenka-Chaplin sand painting to Ligeti.

Alexander Scriabin even wrote a piece, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, that includes a “color organ” that showed his synesthetic relationship between music and color to the audience, resolving to “blue” at the end. A recent San Francisco Symphony performance even added perfumed smells, a successful marketing tactic that sold out the house with audience members that would normally never engage with twenty minutes of abstruse Theosophical exploration.