Game On!

pacmanPhew. I didn’t get vaporized. In fact, my first talk about Video-Game music on March 24 for The Dallas Winds came out pretty well.

Look, I’m a child of the pin-ball era who had only a few chances to toss quarters into the Pac-Man machines. I had a big hill to climb.

I love the Dallas Winds with Maestro Jerry Junkin sparking the podium and long-time friend Kim Campbell at its helm. Their virtuosity as individual players and delicious programming of traditional and new music make every concert a great night. But video-game music? With me giving the pre-concert lecture? So I started to dig.

I had no idea how big the video-game music industry is, or just how much new music composition was taking place. The wide variety of “mixes” of game themes was new to me. So, too, was the idea of orchestras staging profitable video-game concerts (Play!) and bringing in a new generation of listeners.

But it all made sense. The progression from Liszt’s 19th-century tone poems evoking fantastic imagery in the imagination to orchestral music foretelling the action in high-tech video games is a relatively straight line.

Plus, here’s where the money is for today’s composers. The developers of some video games can actually afford to hire actual musicians to record the increasingly lush scores. And those sound tracks sell like hot cakes.

Most important, young people who have never heard an orchestra or wind band in concert, are beguiled by the richness of a solo cello, the shimmer of an oboe solo, or the mystery of a wordless choir. All of this is good for music today.

I’m encouraged to see a move away from decades where vocalists have dominated pop music. Starting with Frank Sinatra’s the, movers and shakers in the pop world have been predominantly singers, whether it be Paul Anka, Bob Dylan, Madonna, or the latest rapper rattling cages today. For young ears to be beguiled by instrumental sound is encouraging.

These’s a lot more that fascinates me. The time-honored Western approach to composition where music had a linear progression of themes and sections marked by repetition and contrast is off the table. The end of any phrase can become a departure for new material, depending on what action the gamer has taken. As David Lovrien (composer and tremendous saxophonist for the Dallas Winds) said, “Imagine you are listening to the 2nd movement of a Beethoven symphony and, at a certain point, a monster eats you! What happens next?”

I learned a lot preparing this talk. I especially loved receiving the instructive comments that quite a few former SMU students made on my Professor Carol Facebook Page after I requested guidance. I was set straight about a lot of limited ideas I had about the genre. Plus I now have the themes for Super Mario Bros., Halo, and Austin Wintory’s Journey stuck in my head.

I could never be a gamer. I can barely sit still for 15 minutes when I write (teaching is a different story—I can talk forever). I don’t have a mind for game strategy in anything more complicated than Mr. Potato Head.

Still, I’m in the groove now. It’s always good to have enough knowledge to move to Step Two: in this case, beginning to separate the good from the bad, the hackneyed from the creative.

Yikes. I see that there is another video-game music concert set for March 2016 Dallas Winds concert: Game-On 2. Well, this time, I’ll have a head start.