The normally staid and fusty world of classical music aficionados became embroiled in a rather strange internal row earlier this year. For several years now, a leading UK classical radio station has conducted a listeners' poll to determine the best-loved pieces of classical music. The resulting chart ranked Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto as the listener's favourite. No great surprise there. However, two of the remaining top five places in the chart went to music composed for PC or Video games; Nobuo Uematsu's music from the Final Fantasy series of video games was placed at no. 3 in the chart, while Jeremy Soule's soundtrack to The Elder Scrolls was ranked at number five.
This meant that Mozart and, for the first time in its seventeen year history, the great Beethoven, were excluded from the upper echelons of the chart. This proved too much for many classical music lovers who lost little time in denouncing the poll as a travesty of cultural "dumbing down" while taking a sideswipe at the genre of video game music as unworthy of consideration alongside mainstream classical music.
But is this fair? After all, for many years, serious classical composers such as Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich and Gershwin have lent their talents to writing film scores which have since become accepted as part of the mainstream classical repertoire. Even composers such as Bach, Mozart and Haydn made their bread-and-butter living from patronage and commissions.
As many contributors to the debate which the controversy has generated have pointed out, much of the work produced by composers for PC and on-line games is steeped in the rich tradition of serious orchestral work. The fact that the prestigious Ivor Novello prizes now recognises video game music as a specific category in its annual awards suggests that the musical establishment agrees with many members of Classic FM's more open minded audience.
While early video game music was largely limited to simple midi based repetitive patterns, the genre has expanded rapidly to the point where the music used for titles, cut scenes and actual gameplay receives almost as much attention as any other aspect of game design. Composers regularly use full size symphony orchestras to produce the range of musical textures required to support and enhance the experience of the game and gameplay.
There's even an element of insider humour creeping into some video game compositions, for example David Bergeaud's music for the pirate sequences in Ratchet and Clank - Tools of Destruction aimed a knowing nod at the music produced by Hans Zimmer (himself no stranger to video game musical composition) for Pirates of the Caribbean.
Compositions for video games are also becoming available to buy as pieces of music in their own right, either as downloads or as part of compilation albums, further advancing their claim to be taken seriously as part of overall mainstream classical and orchestral music. It seems likely, perhaps within the next decade, that no-one will think twice about considering music written specifically for PC and video games as no less serious or worthy than film scores, musicals, or indeed any other category within the rich, broad church of high quality orchestral music.
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