Tucked away in the corner of Schoenberg Hall, where the stress of rehearsing dynamic orchestral pieces runs high and the zeal for video game music runs even higher, the Video Game Orchestra and Choir at UCLA squeezes about 30 members into the organ room every week.
(Courtesy of Peter Dai)
After debuting in the Powell rotunda last fall, the orchestra will return Friday to perform its first full-length concert, “Player’s Choice,” as a part of the UCLA Library’s “Music in the Rotunda” series. The group has been working on the show since the beginning of winter quarter.
The group has been rehearsing for two to three hours every Friday. Minh Nguyen, a second-year music performance student and the orchestra’s main conductor, said the orchestra members’ dedication to video game music is what brings them out to rehearsal every week, even though it is not required. He said that they are here to help promote that genre of music.
“Video game music has always been overlooked and dismissed as childish, but it is a genre that can be enjoyed by anyone,” said José Daniel Ruiz, a post-baccalaureate student in biology and the group’s co-director and music librarian – a job that involves storing the orchestra’s sheet music.
Ruiz said that people are finally starting to accept video game music as a serious genre, especially after music from the 2012 game “Journey” became the first video game score to be nominated for a Grammy Award.
To give the audience an ample sampling of video game music, the group will perform music from popular video games such as “Hikari” from “Kingdom Hearts,” “Still Alive” from “Portal,” “Gerudo Valley” from “Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” and the main theme from “Super Mario Bros.”
The choir will perform the “Super Mario Bros.” theme song, along with “Still Alive,” as a cappella pieces.
The choir will also perform other choral and a cappella pieces, while the orchestra will play classical and symphonic pieces. Each will contribute two to three songs to the concert.
Groups within the Video Game Orchestra and Choir that perform without a conductor, called chamber ensembles, will expand the show’s repertoire by adding in rock, lullabies and even rhythm-and-blues ballad performances.
“The main focus of this year has been the chamber pieces,” said fourth-year mathematics/applied science student and co-director Monica Wang. “It’s going to be a lot of genres. There are definitely a lot of surprises.”
In total, the group will perform 26 pieces, many of which were chosen by the performers themselves.
“That’s part of the whole ‘Player’s Choice’ theme. It’s the performers who help choose the songs, not just (Nguyen) and I,” Ruiz said. “The name ‘Player’s Choice’ is also a play on Nintendo’s rerelease of bestsellers, which were also dubbed ‘Player’s Choice.'”
There were many suggested songs that Ruiz and Wang wanted to include in the show, but because of limited rehearsal time and resources, the pair said they had to set the pieces aside for the future. Wang said that music from “Pokémon,” “Assassin’s Creed,” “Skyrim” and “World of Warcraft” will definitely be on the list for next year’s performances.
As for Friday’s concert, Ruiz said he hopes that the show will allow non-gamer audience members to leave with more appreciation for music used in video games and give gamer audience members moments of recollection and reminiscence.
“They really shouldn’t be called video games. They should be called video and audio games, because the audio is such an integral part of them,” Ruiz said.
The audio contributes to the immersive nature of video games and conjures up entirely new worlds just for the players, Ruiz said.
Friday’s concert will be the start of the group’s campaign to not only bring more recognition to video game music, but also to become the premiere orchestra that people will hire for performances at video game events such as E3 and to become more integrated with the composing scene in Los Angeles.
“I think this is also a perfect time to do something like this because so many people in college are ’90s kids. They’re the kids who grew up with Mario, who grew up with Pokémon,” Wang said. “It will be a night of nostalgia and a night of introduction.”