Real music
During my last semester of college my composition professor went on sabbatical, and the music department brought in a temporary replacement from another school. While my old prof had a frivolous experimental streak — he once had us write pieces to cover up the nameplates outside people’s offices — the new guy was much more traditional.
One day I went to his office to show him a piece I was working on for class. It was just melodic fragments with some chord symbols sketched out underneath, but I wanted his opinion on the direction I was taking. He looked it over and asked, “What’s the instrumentation?”
I hadn’t decided yet, and told him so.
He stared back quizzically. “I don’t see how you can compose without knowing what you’re composing for,” he said. “I always keep the instruments in mind.”
I don’t really work that way, I said, and we got to talking about The Real Book.
The Real Book is a bible for jazz musicians. It contains hundreds of pages of music like this one, called lead sheets. Lead sheets are stripped down transcriptions that contain just a melody and chord symbols; no instrumentation, no dynamic markings, no detailed arrangements. And it is this tradition, not the classical one, that has informed my compositional thinking — much to my new professor’s chagrin.
The Real Book’s lead sheets are based on separating content from form, somewhat like the functional division between HTML and CSS. The written part — melody and chords — contains the core identity of the piece. This must be present in some respect for the performance to be recognizable. However, virtually all of the formal considerations — what the instruments will be, how the chords will be voiced, how long the solos will last, and so on — are at the discretion of the performers.
As someone from a jazz and popular music background, I typically consider a piece independently of a particular recording’s qualities. When I listen to Thelonious Monk play “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” for example, I hear the angular melodic lines and playful reharmonizations in the context of a baseline “regular” version (say, George Harrison’s), but I still keep the two separate. Whether or not Monk is too dissonant for your ear is a completely separate issue from whether you think “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” is a good song.
That separation, incidentally, is why I argue for the quality of old game music — as far as I’m concerned, focusing on the “fake,” low-fidelity sound misses the point. The music is there; the rest is aesthetics.
(UPDATE: Be sure to see Tommy’s response to the following criticism in the comments; as it turns out, we’re on the same page.)
Here’s a snip from game composer Tommy Tallarico’s interview with Guinness World Records:
Isn’t video game music just a constantly repeating loop of blips and bleeps? How can this be a full-time job?
This is actually a huge misconception among people who haven’t played a game in awhile. The reality is that when I first got involved in the game industry over 18 years ago a lot of the music was short repetitive bleeps & bloops. This was because the technology at the time didn’t allow for real music and live musicians. [...] In the mid 90’s DVD’s became a viable storage medium for games. Once this happened, composers and musicians could now use real instruments to create game music. It was an exciting time because no one had ever hear [sic] their video games make these kinds of sounds before.
And this is from the biography on his website:
Tommy Tallarico is a veritable video game industry icon. As one of the most successful video game composers in history, he has helped revolutionize the gaming world, creating unique audio landscapes that enhance the video gaming experience. He is considered the person most instrumental in changing the game industry from bleeps & bloops to real music now appreciated worldwide by millions of fans.
Tallarico rightly dispels the misconception that game music hasn’t evolved past “bleeps and bloops”, but he perpetuates another misconception in the process: namely, that game music before the DVD era was not “real” music.
I have a lot of respect for Tommy — he is, after all, the most prolific game composer of all time. But the idea that old game music was not “real” is a load of bull.
Yes, some of the lasting appeal of old game music can undoubtedly be attributed to nostalgia — but not all of it. There is artistic merit to the pieces of the 8- and 16-bit era that is irrespective of the technical limitations imposed by the hardware. The fact that they are performed by now-antiquated synths does not preclude them from categorization as “real music.”
As the co-creator of Video Games Live, Tallarico must have noticed the continued popularity of Mario and Zelda music. I think that, in his excitement over the new possibilities afforded by modern consoles, he has underestimated the compositional quality of older game music. He has conflated content with form.
(By the way, that lead sheet up above is actually the Koopa Beach theme from Super Mario Kart. Out of context, its harmonic language is indistinguishable from a bona fide jazz standard. But hey, it’s all just bleeps and bloops, right?)
I think people underestimate the power of aesthetics. A Velvet Underground song recorded by Celine Dion might have all the same musical information, but the aesthetics would be incredibly different.
I do agree, there’s nothing inherently inferior about the music of older video game music, just like there’s nothing inferior about music from the 70s and 80s using cheesy old synthesizers, reverb and drum machines. But the aesthetics are so powerful that I don’t expect most listeners to hear through that.
Brad: You’re right, of course. I’m just frustrated when people dismiss a piece based on something like the sound of the instruments. Maybe that’s because I’m just more interested in the composition itself than the aesthetics of a particular performance.
I think your Velvet Underground/Celine Dion example can work both ways. I don’t really like “Toxic” as performed by Britney Spears, but when I first heard it I still thought “hey, that’s a pretty good song.” I’ve since found versions of it that I really like — Yael Naim and Nickel Creek both do great covers, for instance.
You know, I thought about this in the music post I just did with respect to Moorhead’s midi tracks for Betrayal at Krondor. In one sense, “Jimmy the Hand” doesn’t really belong in the same post with modern game soundtracks, when you just compare the dinky synthesizer to the chamber orchestra or instrument samples. On the other hand, “Jimmy” is arguably a better composition than some of the pieces in, say, FFXII, despite the greater fidelity of the presentation in the latter. You make that point better than I would have.
Oh definitely it works both ways. “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails & Johnny Cash for instance. People seem to love Cash’s version more and to me that’s largely due to a changed aesthetic. The song’s basically the same.
Another factor that comes to mind with video game music is there’s a large bias against instrumental music in general in Western culture (I don’t know about the rest of the world). So it’s already got an uphill battle.
While video game music may aspire to the level of film scores, I don’t think scores get treated very well either. It’s pretty rare for me to find someone who kicks back and listens to film scores and I don’t think they sell that well. But obviously scores are tremendously important within the context of films.
I wonder what a poll of film versus game music recognition would be like. How many film scores does the average person recognize versus video games? It would be interesting to see the reach of the Super Mario Brothers theme versus say the Indiana Jones theme.
Great post! Really great. Coincidentally, I made the very same analogy to HTML/CSS in a music theory class I taught last winter!
Have you heard the cover version of Radiohead’s song “Nude,” featuring a band of obsolete electronic equipment? Hard drive heads, a dot matrix printer, and a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t originally built to produce musical sound. There’s a video here.
There’s a striking timbral similarity to chiptunes and video game music of that era, which is remarkable since the sounds in the cover version were not intended be musical. Actually, they weren’t *intended* at all — they were incidental sounds, shaped 25 years later into something we understand as music. So video game music in the early 80s was perilously close to noise in a very real sense: its clicks and beeps were almost indistinguishable from the incidental noises of computers!
This boundary between music and noise is hardly unknown territory (cf. John Cage obviously, but also the introduction of cymbals to the orchestra in the 18th century, and especially Bob Bowen’s brilliant unpublished paper on the quasi-soundtrack of Atari’s Missile Command), but it’s easy to forget that the critics of early video game music have a point.
Yo Dan!,
I actually agree 100% with you!
I think you’ve possibly misinterpreted my words because of editing. Sometimes when interviews are done they don’t take all the words or parts.
I have always talked about how the “old school” game music was some of the best written because the only thing we really had back then was the melody!
The music from Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Castlevania, Pac-Man, etc. is some of the most iconic music of our generation and should be respected as such. This is why they are always some of the most requested and applauded segments in Video Games Live.
My point in answering the question the way I did was to prove to the interviewer that video game music was not still just a bunch of simplistic bleeps & bloops. Some mainstream media and non-gamers still believe this to be the case… which it is not.
This has nothing to do with the quality of the actually music written now or back then. My words were more focused on the tools and technology.
A lot of people (including me) would even argue that a lot of modern game music sometimes isn’t as good because it doesn’t stand out as much as the older stuff. Some composers are relying too much on the technology and real acoustic instruments instead of the catchy music hooks that we needed to rely on in the old days.
Hope this helps to clear up the confusion and your view on my thoughts.
Thanks,
Tommy Tallarico
President, Tommy Tallarico Studios, Inc. (www.tallarico.com)
Executive Producer/CEO, Video Games Live (www.videogameslive.com)
Founder/CEO/Chairman, Game Audio Network Guild [G.A.N.G.] (www.audiogang.org)
Host/writer/co-producer, The Electric Playground & Reviews on the Run television shows
Whoa — I stay away from the computer for one day, and look what happens!
Sparky: I’m with you — your post, and the series you linked to, were definitely on my mind while writing this.
Brad: I’ve heard several people say that Mario is now more recognizable among kids than Mickey Mouse (though I’ve never seen a source for that, to be fair). Given the popularity of video games, I’d put the Super Mario Bros. up against pretty much any movie theme and bet on it coming out on top, especially among younger generations. (What does it have to compete with, really? Star Wars and The Pink Panther?)
Peter: I have seen that cover, and I love it. That’s an interesting point about noise, especially considering that some old sound boards (like the one in the NES) actually had a “noise channel.” (That’s where the beatbox-esque percussion is in the Super Mario Bros. comes from.)
As for those critics you mention: I suppose they might have a point depending on how you define music, but I think that game music is far enough away from “noise” that it’d be disingenuous to define it as such. The fidelity may have been poor, but I can still write out music from the 8-bit era on staff paper and it’ll be demonstrably tonal.
Tommy: Wow, the man himself! Thanks so much for coming by and clarifying your views. I’m glad to hear that we’re actually on the same page here; it seemed odd that we wouldn’t be, given your work. I hope you didn’t take offense to my misinterpretation; as I said in the post, I have nothing but respect for what you’ve done! Hope to see you at that TBA Boston show for Video Games Live.