The Game Composer’s Blog

Program Notes

Video game music is a slave to the video game. Film music is a slave to the film. Maybe that’s why when I sit in a concert hall, I’m extra touchy about the music I’m about to listen to being a slave to anything. Sometimes I feel like I’m being actively encouraged not to let the music just speak to me but rather to let the music be a slave to the composer’s intentions or to some musicologist’s interpretations or who knows what else. What’s the first thing that happens after you enter a concert hall, even before you find your seat? There they are, the legions of nice people handing out the program notes.

And then you have them in your hand, waiting for the concert to begin. It’s natural to just sit there and read through them. It’s interesting to read about the history of the pieces and the lives of the composers. But those program notes are going to direct you to listen to the piece in a certain way. Once an idea about a piece gets in your head, it’s difficult to get rid of that idea. The program notes instantly hamper your ability to find meaning of the piece yourself. Our brains try to find meaning and structure in everything. Music is a great art form because it is so nebulous and open to wildly varying interpretation… as long as the listener is not swayed by already established notions as to what the music means.

Of course, some music is written with a program in mind. Pictures at an Exhibition is an example of that. But Mussorgsky’s work is a masterpiece because the program (the paintings) are not necessary to enjoying the piece and finding meaning with it yourself. A work that relies too heavily on a program is probably not going to stand the test of time. A great deal of modern music sadly falls into that category. The problem is that many of these modern pieces (20th century and beyond) is that they were constructed not with their sound as their primary guide, but rather some new theory of structure or some formula. The sound is merely tangential. My question is, why don’t these composers just write a book about their theories instead? Then we don’t have to sit through them in a concert hall.

A funny aside, I remember once sitting in class in grad school and listening to a visiting composer’s piece of music. The piece was a mess. Absolutely terrible. Before we opened up discussion on the piece, the composer wanted to “explain” where the piece came from and proceeded to tell us a truly horrific episode from their past and how the music is about that. At that point, all honest discussion of the music itself came to a screeching halt… well, before it could even start. If we said anything negative about the piece, we feared being insensitive at best. So there’s an example of a piece of music completely reliant on its program.

Anyway, I’m hoping as a video game composer that my game music can also stand apart from its program (the game). Granted, that’s not going to happen a lot, especially with a piece that’s a minute long and is supposed to loop forever. But that’s my dream. It’s very rare for any game or film music to be able to stand alone. Only a couple come to mind right now, namely the games Grim Fandango and Outcast and the movie Weekend at Bernie’s 2.

But back to the concert hall. To fix this reliance on the Cliffs Notes that are program notes, I humbly request every concert venue in the world to please pass out your program notes after the concert. Then we can see how well our own formulated opinions match up with the established opinions. We may find we don’t care half as much when we bring our own meaning to the conversation. As Garth Marenghi (sarcastically) put it when describing why he writes long explanations about his own paintings, “There’s nothing worse than a work of art that leaves you asking questions.”

March 12, 2010 - Posted by thegamecomposer | Ponderings | game music, program music