There will be many clues that Saturday night's concert at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto is not a typical symphony performance. First, there will be three large screens displaying images and scenes from video games -- Final Fantasy, Halo, even Super Mario Bros. And then there will be the audience, which will probably be younger than the average classical music crowd and, according to the man conducting the action, probably better behaved.
Arnie Roth is a Grammy-winning artist and conductor who has been touring with a concert series called Play! A Video Game Symphony. For this weekend's Canadian stop, the sixth and final show on its tour schedule this year, there will be a 75-member orchestra made up of local symphony players, a chorus with 32 warblers and fancy digital laser projectors, all devoted to music that originally graced video games. Roth says the orchestras he has worked with on the series, from the National Symphony Orchestra in the United States to Sweden's Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, have been most impressed by the gamers filling the seats.
"These people have the best combination of qualities," Roth says of the Play crowds. "You can hear a pin drop during the actual performances.
"The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic said they were better than their usual classical audiences. And the flip side is that you get eight standing ovations, standing and cheering at the end of every piece that is performed. So it is this combination of over-the-top reaction, like a pop audience or a rock audience, but yet the discipline of a classical audience in terms of their listening ability. They are on the edge of their seats and they want to hear everything. And that is absolutely breathtaking for orchestras."
That devotion is easy to understand when you consider how game music reaches the end user. By the time a player finishes a game, they will have listened to the accompanying music, which used to be six-bit bleeps and blurps but is now often fully orchestrated compositions, for untold hours. "That is the unique thing about this concert experience -- so many of these people are spending hundreds of hours hearing the same recorded music tracks over and over and over again," Roth says. "And they are fantastic tracks, but here you can hear that music in new arrangements coming to life and literally breathing onstage."
The connection between playing and listening goes beyond time spent to those moments when music underscores emotional and memorable events in a game's story. One of the most popular selections in Play revolves around the death of a character named Aerith in Final Fantasy VII. The game is a decade old, but Roth says people are still touched by the resonance of Aerith's Theme -- he has even heard of wedding proposals after its final notes have faded.
Naturally, some classical observers without Final Fantasy boxes on their shelves have pooh-poohed the quality of the compositions in the series, which includes themes from classic Nintendo games -- those recurring bleeps turned into woodwind solos -- but also full movements from hits such as the on-line game World of Warcraft and the bestselling Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which recently won its composer, Jeremy Soule, an MTV Music Award. But Roth, a long-time member of Mannheim Steamroller who currently leads the Chicagoland Pops, does not miss a beat in defending the material.
"It is very much a traditional orchestral concert performance," he says. "I think that one could easily put some of the more bombastic and challenging 20th-century film scores or classical scores right up next to these works on the same program and they would stand up very well."
Film scores have been popular choices in symphony halls, and the idea of using live orchestras to play video-game music is old hat in Asia, where games and the people who create them, including composers, are a recognized part of the wider culture. Such concerts did not appear in North America, however, until 2004 when the Los Angeles Philharmonic played Final Fantasy themes in front of a large crowd during the game industry's annual trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. That concert involved a then-27-year-old named Jason Michael Paul, who had worked in game marketing before stage managing for Luciano Pavarotti. When Roth was looking for new material for his Chicago orchestra, the path led to Paul and the two created a 2005 series called Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy.
Several other concert tours focusing on game music started and fizzled that year, but Paul, acting as producer, decided to expand and the 2006 version of Play has music from up to 10 games. The large screens are used for game footage and for shots of Roth and the performers, and the series has featured guest appearances by the composers. (In Toronto, four composers will be onstage, including Soule and the man who wrote the music for most of the dozen-plus Final Fantasy titles, Nobuo Uematsu.) Paul says the crowds have been impressive. At the last show, an early August performance in Vienna, Va., more than 6,000 people bought tickets -- a full house when Renée Fleming, a noted soprano, drew half that number in the same venue a day earlier. The high cost of staging the show means profits are not yet rolling in, Paul says, but there are discussions about continuing the series next year. And beyond profit, he sees this as partly community outreach.
"Our whole philosophy is that the music is first and foremost -- it's the work of the composers that we're trying to promote and, ultimately, to lend credibility to the genre of video-game music," Paul says.
For his part, Roth sees video-game concerts as being just as good for orchestras and classical music as they are for the cultural standing of the source material.
"For orchestras, I think it is an important step forward," he says. "We all know about the greying of the audience, about record sales for classical repertoire going down. The classical industry has to find ways to draw new audiences."
And if those crowds can be well behaved and enthusiastic at the same time -- a symphony performer's dream -- then, unlike the outcome of many games, everyone wins.
Play! A Video Game Symphony, Saturday, 8 p.m., at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto.