The following essay was written by Joyce Lewis and lightly edited by Roger Cutler:
A newspaper advertisement said, “Enjoy two high energy concerts and an interactive game festival with exclusive game footage from World of Warcraft to Halo 3 with synchronized lighting.” This was for two concerts, called Gamer MusiCON '09, presented in the afternoon and evening of July 18, 2009. A past program gives a bit of history:
Fifteen years ago, video game music was a bunch of child-like bleeps and bloops. We've come so far since then. No longer limited to creating MIDI files and attaching sounds to them, we can use live musicians and record and produce real music. ... Video games have emerged in the last five years as the fastest growing sector of the entertainment industry. With more than 150 million Americans playing video games with an average age of 30, there are more video game systems in American homes than stand-alone DVD players. ... The Video Games Live debut performance took place on July 6, 2005, at the Hollywood Bowl featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic. More than 11,000 audience members participated in the biggest video game concert in history.
On stage at Jones Hall were the Houston Symphony, the Houston Symphony Chorus, conductor Jack Wall, host Tommy Tallarico and soloists who travel with the show. From the perspective of a singer in the Chorus it was about as far from Bach and Beethoven as one can get. As expected, much of the music was upbeat with lots of sound effects coming from the percussion section. One interesting thing was that a pre-recorded tape came with the traveling show so that the conductor and many of the symphony musicians all had on headphones in order to hear the countdown (clicks) to the beginning of each section in order to fix the tempo and timing. These clicks continued throughout sections that were synchronized to video action on the screens, so in a sense at these times the conductor was following rather than leading. Chorus members weren't given headphones; we had to depend on the conductor (as we always do anyway).
We didn't have headphones, but we did get individual book lights to clip on our music because one of the main parts of the show was the visual effects which often put us in the dark. There were not only movie-type videos and stills much of the time on huge screens behind and to the sides of us, but there were multitudes of visual lighting effects on the walls behind us, to the sides of us, on us, and on the audience as well.
Imagine trying to sing while lights of all colors are circling and flashing: turquoise zebra-looking “bones” on the back walls and kidney-shaped formations crawling all over the orchestra members.
As for our musical participation, much of our contributions consisted of nonsense syllables and lots of “oohs” and “aahs”, but in one piece we simply shouted, “Hey!” That was it....”Hey!” Unlike our usual concert series in which the content of the performances are identical, in this case the afternoon and evening performances had completely different material and even different titles (Video Games Live and Blizzard Live). Unfortunately for the Chorus, much of the music for the afternoon performance was hot off the press and arrived at the last minute. This music had many obvious mistakes such as a crescendo on the same measure as a decrescendo. More seriously, it had a very sparse reduction of the orchestral part, so in some places we had few cues as when to begin singing and on what pitch -- and the conductor did not give us much help. As a result we were sometimes pretty confused and at these times our performance was, frankly, less than stellar.
The evening concert was a repeat of much of the content from last year and therefore familiar to many of us -- and the printed music was a bit more reliable and complete. The result was a smoother presentation.
These performances involved quite a bit of the audience participation, particularly in the evening concert. There was a costume contest onstage and a segment where an audience member competed for a prize by pushing buttons on a guitar to beat the game on the giant screen. Aside from these organized activities the audience was extremely vocal and interactive; at one point there was a pause in the show that stretched on a bit and members of the audience started yelling suggestions. The people in the audience were mostly quite young, dressed in jeans and video game t-shirts the likes of which we don't normally see in Jones Hall when we perform Mozart or Stravinsky. This crowd came to hear the music of : Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania Rock, Legend of Zelda, Kingdom of Hearts, World of Warcraft (WOW), WOW Wrath of Lich King, Burning Crusade, Wrathgate Zero, Silvermoon, Super Mario Brothers, Halo Suite and Halo 3. Many of these were met with cheers from the audience as they recognized the beginnings of the pieces. In his review in a previous year, a Houston Chronicle reporter said, “You know you're in the presence of a whole lot of nerds when a video of Atari's Pong gets raucous applause.”
Video Games Live has been performed previously at Jones Hall, and in fact Houston is the only city to have it four years in a row. It's likely that many Chorus members will return to sing it in coming years. Where else can you have hot pink polka dots whirling all over your body?