So yesterday I attended the opening concert of the 2007 world tour of Play! – A Video Game Symphony at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts performed by the Symphony Silicon Valley and Chorale. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised, mostly because I have not given video game music its attention that it has deserved for quite some time and never realized that video game music has already gained its status as a first-class citizen in the world of scores.
You see, I am a huge fan of film music, and have been listening and attending film music concerts around the globe since high school (including concerts in Germany, Hong Kong and Los Angeles), but up until recently I have mainly ignored the music of video games, because I am not a gamer and am therefore only vaguely familiar with the most-famous video game compositions like those from Final Fantasy or Halo.
Well, yesterday’s performance included music from video games like Mario Bros, World of Warcraft, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Legend of Zelda, Halo and even world premieres of upcoming titles such as LAIR. Video game music has gotten very far since the times of Tetris. The MIDI files have been replaced with full, orchestral scores that are indistinguishable from other film scores when it comes to format and style. In fact, yesterday’s world premiere of LAIR was even co-composed by John Debney, one of my favorite film composers.
I loved the music of World of Warcraft and to be able to hear Nobuo Uematsu’s Sephiroth from One Winged Angel was absolutely terrific. Sephiroth is one of those action-sequence music with very strong use of a choir that you absolutely love if you are a film music enthusiast, or absolutely hate if you are not familiar with the art of film music.
The concert yesterday was accompanied with (badly edited and inappropriately synced) video game cut-scenes projected on a screen. I very much enjoyed the concert, albeit that I wished that the program would have included Nobuo Uematsu's Eyes on Me. I also think that as a fun gig, musical director and conductor Arnie Roth should have played the music of Tetris in the encore part. That would have been fun.
On a tangent, it turned out that my co-student and teacher from CMU West were at that concert as well, and I even bumped into several co-workers from Microsoft. Either the South Bay is a small world indeed, or we are all computer nerds attending this nerdy concert.