Art Music in Movies and Video Games Part II

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.