As much as I love the Warcraft music, I also enjoying playing while listening to other music. When I’m dpsing (it still occasionally happens) I like to listen to fast modern music with strong rhythmic patterns. Heavy, fast rhythms make a lot of sense when I’m starfalling stuff in the face. When I’m healing, I tend towards softer music, either classical or something else slow and melodic. I find the different music helps me get into the different moods that healing and dpsing require. Killing things requires an adrenaline rush to keep you on the edge of your toes. Healing requires patience and calmness, the ability to continue healing the hunter standing in the fire instead of turning around and starfalling /him/ in the face. So I’ve been going through my music lately to figure out what of my own music is the best for different fights and so far my most played seems to be:
Dpsing ICC: Ladytron, Little Boots, t.A.T.u
Dpsing Ulduar: Abney Park, Bond, Apocalyptica, (Nothing screams boss fight like sexy cellists.)
Dpsing ToC: The Baseballs, Run Lola Run, Quake II soundtrack
Healing ICC: Chopin, Clara Schumann
Healing Ulduar: Apocalyptica, (Cello, is there anything it can’t do?) Erik Satie
Healing ToC: Ed Alleyne-Johnson, Bach
I’m curious if other people do the same thing when they’re called on to switch roles often enough. Is there certain kinds of music that raiders find better for one job over another?
Well since you asked…
Who me, a kingslayer? Fancy that.
Oh, and a server first Earth, Wind, and Fire 25man achievement? Good gracious me.
Now to address the other end of my little rant. In pointing out that video game music and movie soundtracks should be taken as serious music, I want to talk about the other side: that classical music shouldn’t be thought of as dull and boring music by popular culture. Chances are, people who loved the Imperial March would also love The Planets, as long as no one told them it wasn’t classical art music. My problem on this end is that classical concerts, and classical recordings are attended and bought by a completely different group of people: usually older, well educated, and affluent (not always of course, this is just a broad generalization). When you talk to the average teenager and twenty-something, they consider renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, and twentieth century art music as dull and boring (and can’t even name the different periods; for shame our public school system). My own dear mumsie is a music teacher in the public school system in the town I grew up in (though I quit school in fifth grade), and has a degree in early music; because of her I’ve seen first hand how children are raised with the mindset that old music = bad music, despite the best efforts of teachers; it’s just a given in our society.
Why should the younger generations even care? Because early music is what all modern music evolved from, the western tonality that we’re accustomed to can trace itself all the way back to the medieval period with organum and motets. It’s beautiful, amazing music that has an unfortunate reputation of needing an ‘education’ to enjoy, and that’s nonsense. Instead of needing to educate people on how to appreciate this music, we need to not teach them to hate it.
Example time! First, Barbara Strozzi’s Lagrime Mie. Strozzi was an Italian Baroque composer in the sixteen hundreds, from a fairly influential musical family. I can just as easily hear this music as the background for a video game cinematic in which, say, you’ve just discovered the lost city of a long gone elfin culture, as I can being song at the Italian Renaissance courts. This is the kind of music that modern composers draw their inspiration. When you’re trying to set the theme for an ancient race or really anything to do with time, composers go back to our own history and draw from the music that shares similarities with the made up ancient world. Now listen to the undead tavern song from Warcraft. Same kind of sad minor melody, light on texture as well, and to me invokes the same kind of ambiance as Lagrime Mie.
There are also some great examples of the two genres coming together. Another one of my favorite songs is Adam de la Halle’s Robin m’aime. It’s a particularly interesting piece of music, and apt for my purposes because it’s from a medieval musical play about Robin Hood, not a video game in itself, it’s certainly a story many games and movies are based on. Here Marion is singing about how Robin loves her, and how lucky she is. Listen to the very simple refrain, the instrumental opening is just the melody, then it repeats with voice, and then with both and a small amount of harmony. (This piece is also historically important because it’s one of the few medieval pieces whose rhythm we know for certain.) Try to picture it in a video game, the main hero has just departed off for an epic journey, and his childhood friend stays behind to sing a lovely cinematic refrain before the epic music starts and you see the hero’s horsie galloping off to adventure. I don’t know about you, but I can easily picture both that, and sitting in a medieval audience enjoying the play.
And finally, what is probably my favorite video game cinematic of all times. This is from a little well known game called Syberia. This clip is from near the end of the game, you’ve been traveling from France on your way to Seberia via clockwork train with a clockwork conductor, but on your way through an abandoned steel factory somewhere in Russia, you’re clockwork conductor’s amazing hands are stolen by the crazed manager who lives alone in the factory. To get them back, you have to bring him a famous opera singer to come perform for him. This clip is the greatest example of opera and video games going hand in hand.
So while I know it may seem odd to try to put forth a case for teaching early music via video games, I really think this could be the best way to get kids interested in a wider, grander, array of music.
The word opera means work. It got this name because of the massive amount of time and effort that goes into creating an opera: the music, the libretto, the costumes, the stage, the special effects (yes, even in Mozart’s time. Want to guess how frequent it was for opera houses to burn down back then?). This is the exact same thing that goes into creating a very successful video game. The real difference is in audience participation. At an opera you are not active; you sit, watch, and are suppose to follow certain rules of concert etiquette but no one ever does. In a video game you are an active participant. The world is yours to explore and to directly respond to.
Let me start by comparing my favorite operatic aria with my second favorite quest in Warcraft. Take this clip from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Here, the evil Queen of the Night is telling her daughter and heroine of the opera, to go kill someone. See how the drama of the situation is actuated by the scenery, the costumes, and, most of all, the music to help tell the story and get the emotions across to the audience? Now watch Lament of the Highborn. Here Sylvanas recounts her life before she was a forsaken, by using the music to tell the story while it plays out around her: costuming, storyline, scenry, music: opera.
There is no better example of the operatic nature that a video game can achieve with its music than The World of Warcraft. Each zone, faction, race, fight, has its own specific music.
Eversong Woods was my first zone, and this cello solo my first real listen at the Warcraft soundtrack. I’m biased, I admit, my main instrument is cello. But the music perfectly resonates with the zone and the blood elves. The zone itself is rich in color and architicture, but straight down the center runs the corrupted strip of land populated by undead. It’s both beautiful and melancholy, and the music is the same. The texture of the music starts out with light harp, and adds the cello on the melody in its lower richer register.
Eversong Woods
Or take the Storm Peaks. This is a zone populated with towering snow capped mountains and ancient titan buildings. The music uses instruments that carry for the main melodies; mostly voice, brass, and woodwinds. This has a much more heavy texture to it, with deep brass sounds and very clear multi-layered vocals. The music has spots of occasional thin orchestration and softer tones, which all combined reinforce the sense of majestic awe that the mountains and titans give.
Storm Peaks
In both of these zones the story, art, and music are worked together to create a more important overall work; just as an opera would.
Another amazing piece of music is the the gunship battle. This music only appears when combat starts in the third boss of Icecrown Citadel. You can hear parts of the opening credit theme, but the orchestration is much more bright and militaristic. There’s lots of sticcato, both in the heavy layered brass section as well as in the strings. It’s a dramatic and romantic piece while you shot cannons back and forth and use your rocket pack to go knock out the other faction’s gunship.
My point in illustrating these five pieces of music in context with their visual art is not that Warcraft has an amazing soundtrack (it does) but that this is exactly the kind of composing that has been done for hundreds of years in the classical operatic repertoire. It took just as much talent and thought by the composers as opera did, and deserves real credit for the amount of ability that went into it.
After I started writing this, I found that Blizzard had linked to a great podcast, All the Cool Parts that goes into exactly what I’ve been thinking about for years, only in much greater detail. I can’t recommend highly enough listening to episode eight (I find it goes well with leveling an alt). I’m also well of aware of great things like the Video Game Live a traveling orchestra that plays video game music in a proper concert setting. It’s things like these that give me hope the amazing modern art music that is being composed for movies and video games is slowly making its way into mainstream accepted art music. But the Video Game Live concerts are attended by a very different crowd than the concerts I lamented about in part I of this little rant. What I want is to see is video game music, movie soundtracks, and the classical repertoire being played side by side as equally beautiful and important music.
In the modern world of classical music there has long been a lament that modern composers cannot get their music played. If you are like me and enjoy going to symphony concerts and operas, you will know that the repertoire of every major orchestra is about one hundred years and older. Every now and then I’ve see small community orchestras play pieces by members of their ranks who are also composers, but composing art music just for live orchestras is all but impossible. To some extent I agree with the lamenters, it is sad that most live concerts are the same music over and over, but I disagree about the idea that modern composers no longer have work, because they do: in video games and movies.
The problem is, many people do not consider video game and movie soundtracks artistic music; and this greatly saddens me. Historically speaking, video game and movie music evolved quite closely from the Romantic Era music of the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds (as well as the slightly later 20th century music). The same chords and theory that the Romantic Era composers used is the same template that modern composers use. Before this, the Classical era of music focused on order, patterns, and structure. That isn’t to say they weren’t trying to express emotion, but the ways they composed it were very different. With the switch to the Romantic Era (think Beethoven) the emphasis changed to direct methods of expressing emotion (extended chords, ending on notes not belonging to the cadence, purposeful dissonance). Unlike the early music, what the Romantics considered sad, happy, dramatic, depressing, etc. in their music, is what every one in the western world today still thinks of. And video game and movie soundtracks are written with the same theory today. Because this is still what is considered dramatic, composing it requires extensive education and training in classical art music. As well, in many movies (and some video games) they directly use Romantic and 20th century music.
I’m sure everyone has heard Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana at some point, even if they don’t attend concerts; it’s a very popular piece for battle scenes. The music was written in the early 20th century, and is considered part of the ‘classical’ repertoire, but it is the perfect example of how the two frequently overlap (as an interesting side note, the music may be modern, but the lyrics are actually medieval goliard songs—wandering drunken scholarly monks—and if you translated it, is actually quite bawdy).
But let me go one step further with an example. Take The Imperial March from Star Wars. Where did Mr. Williams get the idea? According to my musicology professor, directly from Gustav Holst’s Mars from The Planets. In fact, before the score itself had been finished, ‘Mars’ is what they used in the background while they were editing.
That’s a long enough rant for now and I’ve only touched on specific movie soundtracks. Part II I’ll be looking more at video game music.
