Real life mashup: classical music from classic games
By Leo Ryan April 18th, 2007
In Branded content · Stories
Eminence is an Australian orchestra who are working to bring classical music to young audinces. Their rather unique way of doing this is to perform the scores of video games. Their next concert is A Night in Fantasia: Symphonic Games Edition (ANIF07: SGE) is at the Sydney Town Hall in April.
Eminence has invited emminent game score composers to attend the concerts and this year guests include Yoko Shimomura, best known for her work in the Kingdom Hearts series, the composer also created the soundtrack for Super Mario RPG and contributed to the Front Mission series. Also attending are two returning composers who were at last year’s concerts; Hitoshi Sakimoto, composer of scores for Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics and Yasunori Mitsuda famous for his work on Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross and Xenogears.
You can see examples of their concerts on their site, embedded from YouTube, natch.
1 Mat Morrison // Apr 18, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Nobuo Uematsu rules.
2 Mat Morrison // Apr 19, 2007 at 8:55 am
Is this strictly a mashup, BTW? If so, was it a mashup when the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played Queen’s Greatest Hits? I remember this as one of the highlights of my early teens.
3 Leo Ryan // Apr 19, 2007 at 9:37 am
Well its all new semantic territory isn’t it? I like to think it is a mashup because its a mix of virtual and physical. Does that make the food at E&O an asian / western mashup? Have I just devalued this word? Should I apologise? What’s the opposite of a neologist?
4 Mat Morrison // Apr 19, 2007 at 11:08 am
A pedant, I suspect.
I don’t know - I’m not all that certain that I know how best to use the word “mashup” either. Is it simply a fusion of two genres?
AFAIK, “mashup” derives from the Jamaican patois word — I first heard it used in the late eighties by stoned reggae-loving public school kids (cf. trustafarian), “Man, I was mashup last night”.
The next time I heard the word, it was being applied to what I had always understood to be called “bootlegs” — the unlicensed and non-commercial remixes of two popular songs that fed on the huge glut of digital music and cracked software that resulted from Napster and AudioGalaxy.
When these tracks (and videos) were British, they were “bastard pop” or “bootlegs” (cf. Cartel Communique). When they were American, they were “mashups” (although there are some notable exceptions: cf. Bootie)
From there, it was only a short step to web-application mashups and the rest. There’s a good definition of these (and list of useful links) over at the Programmable Web.
Basically, however, all mashups take (n>1) things and make a new thing. It’s what Levi-Strauss would call bricolage, what Caroll would call a portmanteau, it’s remixing, it’s hacking.