Conference Agenda

Video games have, for decades now, no longer needed to rely on the 8- and 16-bit “beeps” and “boops” of their early ancestors. Today, lavish symphonic scores are just as likely to be heard in a game as chiptunes or even Top-40 pop. But orchestral arrangements of video game music have existed since the late 1980s, with Koichi Sugiyama’s Dragon Quest suites (1987) and Nobuo Uematsu’s Symphonic Suite Final Fantasy (1989). These orchestral suites were arranged from the 8-bit scores of these composers’ early music and, since then, numerous orchestral arrangements have been created based on video game scores, leading to what William Gibbons (2018) has called the “classifying” (or classicalization) of video game music.

In this paper, I am especially interested in examining the classical arrangement of video game music into genres that Michael Long (2008) would identify as existing in the “high classical” register: namely, the concerto, theme and variation, and the symphony. In particular, I expand existing theories of multimedia arrangements (Van der Lek 1994, Audissino 2014, and Lehman 2018) to consider not only how multimedia scores can be arranged for the concert hall, but why certain genres are employed. Drawing on theories of translation, adaptation, and (musical) narrativity, in this paper I will argue that musical genres can support and intensify the narrative meaning of their source games through a process of what linguist Roman Jakobson (1959) calls “intersemiotic translation.”

I begin by outlining how arrangement studies can provide a new way of conceptualizing intersemiotic translation by way of musical narrative, drawing on translation theorist Lawrence Venuti’s (2007, 2010) distinction between an “instrumental” understanding of meaning vs. a hermeneutic understanding of meaning. Then, following Stefan Greenfield-Casas’ (2022) analysis of the translation of the individual vs. society narrative conflict from game to the concerto genre (cf. McClary 1987), I use two generic (genre-ic) case studies to demonstrate my claim: the theme and variations (with Natsumi Kameoka’s Concert Paraphrase on “Dearly Beloved”), and the symphony (with The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses).

This paper shows how ludic leitmotifs derived from texted songs are invested with added layers of contextual meaning and how they augment the player's experience. Games also sometimes introduce a song's lyrical version at the end, like Three Houses, adding temporal dimensions to a player's musical interpretations; they retrospectively reflect on its uses throughout the game. With these additional layers, players engage with prescribed ludic tasks (e.g., combat, traversal) with a more empathetic understanding of their narrative repercussions, as though the situations themselves are given personas (Cheng 2014).

For example, during their first playthrough of Three Houses, players discover that Edelgard, a presumed classmate, was a secret villain hellbent on ridding the world of "crests," bodily symbols that grant bearers with special powers. In the song, the narrator, clearly an analog to Edelgard, asserts their desire to rid the world of such a preferential system, but laments that the happy days they currently live will be replaced by a violent commitment to their ideals. As the game encourages many subsequent playthroughs, players gain a heightened sense of immersion from a distinctly semantic understanding of the game's battles and exploration sequences.

The study of ludic leitmotifs has historically focused on story (Smith 2020, 8-bit Music Theory 2020) or their contribution to UX design, i.e., "user experience" (Collins 2008). In my study, meanwhile, I blend these two perspectives, providing insight into a specifically ludic-narrative interpretation of musical theme by further investigating how players become invested in a game's tasks through narrative.

In his 1991 article “Defining a Prototypical Utterance,” Robert Gjerdingen identifies a Fonte schema in the closing credits music of the television show Leave It to Beaver. As Gjerdingen notes, modern exemplars of galant schemata can shed light on the long-term stability of particular musical conventions in tonal repertoire. However, the presence of older schemata in more recent music may also raise questions about stylistic influence—how patterns from one repertoire made their way into a seemingly unrelated body of works centuries later. For instance, the Prinner schema appears in the soundtracks for several video games from the 1980s and early 1990s, but seems to be no evidence that game composers would have been familiar with galant musical practices.

In this paper, I will use a schemata-based approach to show how the harmonic syntax of early video game music was informed by earlier tonal repertoire. I argue that galant schemata entered video game music via early to mid-twentieth-century popular genres alongside other paradigms from those styles. I will begin by summarizing the musical landscape of video games from the early 1980s, which predominantly relied on pre-existing music rooted in classical or twentieth-century popular styles (Lerner 2013/2014, Gibbons 2009, Plank 2019). I will then discuss several schemata found in original video game soundtracks in the following years—including the Prinner, the Fonte, and several cadential formulas found in early twentieth-century popular music—and discuss the ways in which those patterns changed as they entered video game soundtracks.