A reader offers his review from the BBC Gaming Prom and considers how it will affect the mainstream popularity of video game music.
Earlier this month, the 21st concert of this year’s BBC Proms season concluded with the first Gaming Prom, From 8-Bit to Infinity, with Robert Ames conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. For over 10 years attending video game music concerts, I have always viewed this event as a goal that would be unattainable, with video game music being looked down upon by the traditional classical music community as a contemporary idiosyncrasy. Then suddenly, this year, both Classic FM and the BBC are announcing two concerts within two months of each other – it certainly changed my expectations very quickly.
For the benefit of Metro’s international audience, the BBC Proms is an eight-week classical music festival that has been held every summer in London for nearly 130 years, with the BBC running the program since 1927. The aim is to provide an accessible route to introduce the general public to the many forms of classical music, with prices significantly lower than a standard concert (e.g. standing tickets are sold on the day for £ 7).
Concerts are regularly broadcast on radio and TV, making this festival an inevitable part of the British way of life, whether you consider yourself patriotic or not. Due to the broadcast element of the Proms, the view of the orchestra can be obscured by the increased lighting effects and constant moving of television cameras, but personally I didn’t find it a distraction.
The concert began with an original piece by classical composer Matt Rogers, commissioned by the BBC, in which he expressed his appreciation for the ZX Spectrum and its contribution to many British youth in the 1980s. As enjoyable as it sounded, I couldn’t pin down the soundtrack of a single game for the duration of 10 minutes.
It wasn’t until the end that I noticed something: there was a series of buzztones that were characteristic of a specific musician who was prominent in the 8-bit era, namely Tim Follin. My trigger was well-founded, as the piece turned out to be an interpretation of Chronos, an obscure shoot ’em-up released on a budget label in 1987 with the music composed by Follin himself, showing off his talents with extremely limited hardware.
With the benefit of being able to discuss this with the composer himself after the performance, I discovered that the original intention was to produce a medley of up to 30 odd games, but rights issues led to the need to narrow that down to just one. . Extending a solitary soundtrack from three minutes to 10 minutes took a lot of creative freedom, and listening back I can detect the occasional nod to the loading process of these games.
Loading Chronos was the first of two pieces commissioned for the concert, and the second was a medley of three soundtracks representing the cartridge era of the 1990s, dedicated to non-binary contemporary composer, Cee Haines. Their medley consisted of Pokémon Red/Blue, Ecco The Dolphin and Secret Of Mana and while it was a somewhat quirky trio to combine, it was performed so smoothly together that I seemed to get lost in my own fantasy halfway through.
However, the concept of honoring the Game Boy’s original sound through ‘electronic enhancement’ of the woodwinds in the orchestra (particularly the oboe and england) gave mixed results in my opinion: the reed-scratched sound felt more like a parody. , possibly an insult to the console’s hardware limitations, almost as if the Pokémon theme was played through kazoos. However, that dissonant sound added so much to the haunting and uneasy sensation behind Lavender Town’s background music that I’ve never heard in any other rendition or remix.
That wasn’t the most heart-wrenching performance of the evening – I have to applaud everyone who made it into Battlefield 2042’s rosters, with its dystopian atmosphere that truly brought home the horrors of a futuristic war. When you’re high up in the cheap seats and still feel your seat vibrate from the bass, you know you’re witnessing something special.
Other pieces played that night would have been more familiar to those who have attended video game music concerts in the past, such as The Legend Of Zelda, Final Fantasy 7, and Kingdom Hearts. These were simple, straightforward performances without any real depth or added sweetness that would normally be added to, say, a Distant Worlds or Video Games Live concert. But it didn’t matter, because everything sounded… well, appropriate.
Prom 21 really tried to consolidate over 35 years of video game music history into a concert that would appeal to both those familiar with video game history and a typical Proms audience more familiar with 350 years of classical music. There would always be a tricky balance to try to appease the desires of one end of this spectrum without alienating the other, and for the most part this was successful, with positive reviews from serious classical music journalists on Bachtrack and The Telegraph outweighed the only negative review I could find: a short and snappy review from The Times.
The real litmus test for me, however, comes from The Observer’s radio reviewer, a self-confessed non-gamer who listened with no prior knowledge of the games represented – her positive review gives me confidence that this first Gaming Prom was a success.
We’d like to know: How would you like video game music to be presented in concerts in the future? Do you like mixing different gaming soundtracks, or music from just one video game favorite? Or do you want to hear it alongside its classic inspirations?
Answer below!
— Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (@rpoonline) August 2, 2022
So with this concert being performed nationally, filmed and broadcast on both radio and TV, video game music in the UK has now plunged into the mainstream. So where do we go from here? There is a range of possibilities such as further exposure on TV and radio outside of specialized slots, celebrity endorsement or perhaps even a commercial release making its way onto the charts.
I think this would be a step too far and the genre will lose some of its charm, but life rarely stands still and now that the BBC has accepted video game music as part of its roster of classical music genres, its future is uncertain. One positive thing to realize, though, is that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is showing a greater commitment to performing something similar to these Proms again in the future, and is asking their followers how to go about it.
For those unable to attend (or wish to relive) the Gaming Prom, the TV and radio broadcasts will be available through BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds until October 10. Finally, highlights from the concert will also be broadcast to multiple countries worldwide on the BBC World Service’s shortwave frequencies this weekend.
By reader GGEuDraco (Steam ID/Pokémon Go: 5678-1979-9408)
The reader’s position does not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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