Can you imagine the collection of pasty, unkempt, reality-dodging, adult-virgin basement dwellers who would have shown up for this? In one of the more depressing dumbing-downs this site has seen for a while, the once-venerable Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has been reduced to playing … video game music:
Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub of Penny Arcade TV’s ‘Blaminations’ and ‘The Scott and Kris Show’ will host, and all-round gamer dude Wil Wheaton of Toy Soldiers, Stand By Me, Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory will also appear. (Look out for Scott’s limited edition ‘Symphony of Legends’ posters. Did somebody say autographed copy?)
The show will also feature Orchestra-sized (read epic) game play, cut scenes, special lighting effects, and solos by some of the musicians who played on the original games.
Honestly, they lost me after the word “music”. What does that even mean? One has to feel for the poor performers forced to sing for their supper for a bunch of overgrown kids who’ve never outgrown comic books and who, like porn addicts who can’t relate to women (actually, I suspect the Venn Diagram is pretty tight here), can only absorb high culture through the prism of their electronic fantasy land. They would have felt like Karajan being forced to conduct not the Berlin Philharmonic performing Beethoven’s 9th but rather the Boston Pops belting out the theme from Star Wars.
What’s next? The Australian Chamber Orchestra putting on a show of “great porn movie guitar ensembles”?
Prick With A Fork 
The Australian Chamber Orchestra putting on a show of “great porn movie guitar ensembles”?
I’d pay for that………………….NOT
Bit like Opera on a football oval or Shakespeare in drag….. there is always a new low to strive for.
Whenever we have to endure Labor in power, it seems their followers without exception tend to sidetrack themselves from the inevitable mess that their idealistic policies always create. p.s. more to come!
This is just the end of the slippery slope the Opera House is riding in Sydney. Check out the billboards outside to see how desparate they are to drag low culture into the temple of high culture.
I dunno mate, the MSO would routinely get criticised for sticking to a repertoire of pieces that were popular 300 odd years ago. Classical music is a developing genre, and still a popular one in film, television and, yes, video games. So it seems worthwhile to pay some attention to the music that’s being written for these mediums. A lot of it is dross and filler but some of it strikes me as being quite clever.
And after all, should we really just ignore those musos that write for those mediums? The habit people have of regarding music as simply there for ‘background atmospherics’ has peed me off for a long time – the people who write and perform that music are professionals, and they do a job, and they deserve some attention.
While I admit that, on the face of it, this might seem suspect, when a games production cost is upwards of US$40m, it is surely not unreasonable to engage the symphony orchestra of a major western city to play the score.
For example, Final Fantasy 13 hired the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra and Final Fantasy 10, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.
Although you might find a particular medium unappealing, is it not possible that it might still contain some attractive features? Some of the music composed for video games is both highly emotive and moving while also quite capable of being enjoyed without the accompanying gameplay. These are, for some part at least, not at all pop music scores but extremely complex and ‘high art’ compositions.
If interested, perhaps try some of the work of Nobuo Uematsu. (It does tend to be Japanese composers on the whole)
Most telling of all, surely it’s a positive that these institutions are actually making some effort to fund themselves, rather than just producing unpopular shows that no-one wants to see and hence relying on the rest of us for their operating and upkeep costs.
Btw, enjoying the blog very much. Found it by wait of Tim Blair’s site and I find myself coming back regularly.
What about Mario Bros?