For those of you who like music and/or video games (I think there is a lot of overlap in my readership on these two interests!) there was a segment on Weekend Edition this morning about the Video Games Live concert tour. It includes a full orchestra and choir combined with synchronized lighting, video, live action and audience interactivity. A quote from the NPR story about Video Games Live:
“If Beethoven were alive today, he would be a video-game composer. ... He was always ahead of the curve. His whole thing in music was to control the emotions of the person listening to it.” -- Video Games Live organizer Tommy Tallarico
I think this tour has been going on for awhile, so maybe you-all already know about it, but I thought it sounded very interesting!
btw, speaking of Beethoven, there was a Beethoven Extravaganza yesterday in New York that I am sorry I missed. Hearing the story made me want to head over to the library (oops, closed on Sunday) to check out a pile of Beethoven cd's....
2 comments:
Yep, definitely heard of it, though I haven't been. We have been to some other concerts where the music is from video games, namely the Final Fantasy series (We've been to both the Dear Friends concerts that were held in LA), and they were excellent. A lot of the impact of the music comes from how it's tied to the stories and games we first experienced it in, and that can make it a lot more powerful (for me, at least) than a classical music concert, which I don't have as many associations with. Oddly, though, you can form these associations with most any pieces of well formed music: whenever I hear Mahler's first symphony, I have visions of space ship fleets, operatic star battles and so forth, for when I bought that CD, I was playing a very old game called Master of Orion, and they have forever been linked for me.
Now that's interesting about the Mahler piece... That was my father's favorite symphony. When I first remember listening to it, probably when I was in my early teens, I was reading H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds, so the piece has a strong association with that story, so I imagine spaceships and all when I hear it also!
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