"To hear good music, not to watch visuals onstage - that’s the right reason to be at the game music concert".
Interview with Arnie Roth
Added by: Kamil Rojek, 2009-09-20 15:50:55
GameMusic.net: Do you listen to game music in your free time? What are your favorite tracks?
Arnie Roth: Most of my music listening outside of actually rehearsing and performing as well as learning new scores, consists of research – of new composers, arrangers, artists, and yes, game composers as well. I must say that I am a fan of the work done by Bjork and Vincent Mendoza on the “Dancer in the Dark” CD. But this is just one small example of some of my favorite music to actively listen to. Since I find it impossible to casually listen to any music, because I cannot turn off the analytical side of my mind when even casually listening to background music, the only real break comes when I can actually turn everything off for a while and deal with some silence. Of course there are natural sounds around us all the time, but for a musician like me, I find a quiet environment, with no music at all a real break for me – a walk on a beach, in the forest, etc.
GameMusic.net: As far as I know, you are very keen on the works of Ravel…
Arnie Roth: Certainly. There’s a whole world of composers that I love, like Ravel, Tchaikovsky or Liszt.
GameMusic.net: What is your experience with Polish classical works? Have you ever conducted an orchestra that performed compositions by Polish composers?
Arnie Roth: Many times. You’ll hear aspects of that in this “Turrican II” theme we’ve prepared for today’s evening. It’s really like a great solo piano concerto, along the lines of some of the great Fryderyk Chopin pieces. Great pianism is definitely involved in this particular piece. You know better than I do - there are a lot of fans from Poland that write to us from the Distant Worlds website, and they constantly ask us to come to Warsaw. And we’d like to.
GameMusic.net: Well, you have to, because Video Games Live heads to Poland for 3 concerts this year.
Arnie Roth: That’s what I heard. You know, Video Games Live is a very different thing from what we do, of course. We are an acoustic live concert. Video Games Live has a couple of actors acting in battle scenes, climbing up on the rafters. They have a laser light show going on. And that’s fine - there’s a place for that. But I don’t know if here, in the concert hall, there’s a place for that. I think, frankly, that orchestra musicians really love the Video Games Live format because the audience shows their appreciation a lot more explicitly. I know Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall pretty well. Their show is about the spectacle. It’s not so much about music. We’re trying to create something live.
I also have another theory: gamers spend hundreds of hours playing a game, and they’re listening to the same background music track, with the same tempo. It may be a beautiful performance, like the soundtracks of World of Warcraft, Oblivion, Battefield, or Final Fantasy, but it’s the same one, over and over again. For hours, they’re hearing the same recording, with no change. These tracks also have the same compression - they have to compress the dynamics, because the game can’t be changing the track’s volume all the time. So all the loud and soft parts are squashed down. Then, these gamers come here, and they hear 150 performers on stage playing a real triple piano, or a triple forte with timpani! Normally, they just don’t get that kind of dynamic range. Of course, this is necessary - that’s what the technology is. So they’re hearing the pushing and pulling of tempos, for the first time. I think this experience is quite new for most of the video game fans that come to our concerts.