Anime Why aren't there any game devs who use classical music in soundtracks?

[Maxwell's Demon]

As for the topic, the problem with using classical music in a game stems from a multitude of factors, including needing to hire musicians to play out the music sheets, making sure the music fits the scene and doesn't distract players from the level/scene, and sometimes needing to remix the music without sounding awkward.

All of these problems still exist when a composer writes a new piece of music. They often have to iterate in order to address these issues.

As such often it's more interesting for musicians to make music they want rather than play out something from a music sheet.

You mean it's more interesting for the composers. Probably because then they get paid more.

Individuals' personal tastes aside, I'm sure the musicians are satisfied playing whatever piece of music comes their way. They are referred to as "starving musicians" for a reason.

 

[Excommunicator]

With modern midi software, it would actually be ridiculously simple to just take the sheet and associate it with virtual instruments. It's basically a matter of seconds - I can demonstrate it if anyone's interested.

I'm guessing you've never really done it before if you think you can simply associate the midi tracks to virtual instruments and have it sound good. It sounds fake and often horrible unless you spend hours applying realistic dynamics and articulations using a high quality sampled library

 

[Excommunicator]

As for classical music in games it's not quite the no-brainer it seems to be. You can either license existing recordings (expensive), perform your own recording (very expensive) or do a virtual mockup (still not cheap but also time consuming and never as good)

Not to mention all the other downsides like trying to leave a unique mark upon the player when all of the music they hear in your game has been heard by thousands or millions of other people over the course of a hundred or more years

 

[Kefka1134]

Sorry not sure if someone else mentioned but Koji Kondo wanted to use Ravel's Bolero for the theme of NES Zelda but copyright issues got in the way, is my understanding.

So that's one thing.

 

[Kefka1134]

The USSR said that Shostakovich turned the tide of WWII in their favor. What exactly has Taylor Swift accomplished? Why is, "Classical music is boring," even an argument?

Honestl another thing is like Jeremey Soule/Koji Kondo and stuff are pretty amazing... there's lots of really cool composers in the present day. Sometimes I think also they just are like well these people we have now are pretty dang good...

 

[Lyric Suite]

Not to mention all the other downsides like trying to leave a unique mark upon the player when all of the music they hear in your game has been heard by thousands or millions of other people over the course of a hundred or more years

To be fair, the amount of classical music most people who aren't classical music fans are familiar with is like 1% of the total, and the vast majority of classical music fans don't play video games.

The simplest explanation is that video game composers just aren't that familiar with classical music to begin with.

 

[Jagged Appliance]

Aside from the practicalities of using classical music in your game you'd also need someone knowledgeable on the team to choose the pieces and avoid your soundtrack becoming an incoherent mishmash of whatever classical music the majority of people are aware of.

I remember CIVII:Test of Time had a lot of classical pieces done electronically and it was fine but soundtracks aren't so vital in that style of game.

 

[Kefka1134]

Most obvious answer - because most game devs are musically uneducated and they don't know what "classical" music is. Most game composers are as well. Even the people who ARE educated, like Jeremy Soule, are one-dimensional and can't seem to get out of Renaissance voice-leading (sometimes not even that) coupled with a skewed understanding of the logic of Romanticism. They also have boring inventions and just aren't creative. "Classical" music also isn't "in" with the cool kids.

I really think that's the extent of the whole problem. Musically uneducated game devs + composers, the unpopularity of "classical" music, and the inability/unwillingness of actually educated game composers to compose in such a manner. Most of their orchestration is abysmal/nonexistent as well.

Well, that’s actually the reason Jeremy Soule is better than most or even all classical music composers. He really is just one of the best.

Beside, the only way to view Romanticism is with skewed logic, because it’s all intentionally skewed and tripe anyway. Outside of the first opening bars of Schuberts 8th symphony it's all downhill pretty much everywhere. Even the poster boy of Romancticism, Beethoven, his best compositions came early on with the likes of the German Dances and such.

Finally, orchestration is kind of like the light show aspect of music, it's fundamentally a bit cheap since it supposes to make things appear solid and epic, whereas composition is where true talent and effects are created.

I actually have a habit of just quickly finding synesthesia piano versions of anything so I can really hear the music and not have to try and find the melodies beneath a trombone blowing onto a fierce D note and obscuring something else.

I won't really dispute that most game developers or even most game composers are musically uneducated, but at the same time, talent substitutes for education, and education or understanding is not a substitute for talent.

 

[Kefka1134]

To be fair, the amount of classical music most people who aren't classical music fans are familiar with is like 1% of the total, and the vast majority of classical music fans don't play video games.

The simplest explanation is that video game composers just aren't that familiar with classical music to begin with.

As for this topic, most classical music fans, actually around even 99.5% of them are mostly just there because it's how they look or seem invested in "high art," but in reality are just following the classical music "fans" who are mostly highly repentent elderly figures who spent the vast majority of their life rocking out to Dylan, who manages not only to not be high art but to not even be a good pop artist.

Well, that, or they are the parents who just browbeat their children into it and which tends to manifest in the form of these people who played piano for like 9 years and yet always just wanted to be pop artists and they have that whole rebellion thing and etc etc.

Most of the people who really appreciate, well, not just classical music, classical literature, classical anything, have been gamers in my experience.

I had a couple amazing piano teachers for awhile one that was really passionate about Mozart though so I'm not going to throw all of those traditional people into one category, and the other who had a knack for finding really obscure and interesting things.

Actually though on that topic, Mozart is actually the greatest composer, used to have this discussion on a forum for classical music fans way back when.... yeah way separate story.... it's this combination of great confidence and a sillly message, which is extremely rare, well anywhere. Like if you hear Vivaldi, it's all fun and playful, but you know it's just silly at the same time, Mozart raises the stakes, it's like a power metal version of the essence of pop.

And on that topic Vivaldi is massively underrated. Beethoven earlier on was kind of like a Mozart-lite, had all the bells and whistles but wasn't at the same level necessarily.

And... I'm just getting increasingly off topic lol sorry.

Oh one more thing though! That ascension in the Lacrimosa section of Mozart's requiem..... that right there.. that... is something special.

 

[Lacrymas]

There are so many things wrong with those statements that I don't know where to even begin, lulz. I suppose chronologically. Jeremy Soule isn't the best "classical" music composer. There is no such thing as "classical" music, apart from the Classicism of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. They didn't know they are "classical", that term originated in the early-to-mid 19th century to name the already elevated status of these three composers. They named them "classics" in lieu of the High Classicism of the ancient Greeks. They were museum exhibitions basically. The concert hall was made available to everyone who could afford a ticket and that was what the audience demanded. Brahms was the only known composer to still be in the employ of the aristocracy, so the orchestras had to play what the audience demanded and the mainstream is always the language of the past. If you think that Jeremy Soule is one of the best contemporary "classical" composers, that's nonsensical. He's so far away from the contemporary serious musical composition that I don't know how you can think that. Listen to Penderecki (who is still alive) -

Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Schnittke, Stockhausen are other names you might want to check out.
Romanticism in music is a convoluted topic. The technique used was called "stufenreiche Harmonik" by Schoenberg (harmony which is abundant in steps), the chromatisation of the brass section in the orchestra made this possible. Then it goes crazy. The nationalism that was contemporary then due to the French Revolution, and Hegel's musings that history leads to some kind of logical progress (20th century thought debunks this concept of progression in history), made the German people name and think of themselves as "Welthistorichenation" (there is no literal translation, but it's basically a nation that affects the history of the world). This goes hand in hand with what Nietzsche thought about music - that it is at the top of the hierarchy of the arts. Liszt and Berlioz (who weren't German) went to Weimar to make the music of the future. Why? Because the German have Beethoven, Bach and Wagner (among others) in their musical tradition and of course they are going to be Welthistorichenation. Liszt and Berlioz continued the concept of gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts) which was laid by out Wagner. This program of the music is the extra-musical factor that achieved this synthesis, the music can be listened and understood without it. Music doesn't need extra-musical factors because it's at the top of the hierarchy. This search for programs actually led to the very chromatic language of the late-Romanticism (which in turn led to atonality and dodecaphony). Listen to Nuages Gris or La Lugubre Gondola by Liszt. The skewed understanding of Romanticism is in this program. Uneducated composers put the program on a pedestal and not the music and that's the problem.

Orchestration is an art in of itself and it has nothing to do with the way modern film/game composers treat the orchestra. They use it as a clutch to obscure their ineptitude as composers, because incompetency is easily masked by the bombast of the orchestra. They aren't using it properly though and the orchestration is poor and sounds bad. If they did the orchestration right you wouldn't need to find a piano synesthesia of it to hear the important stuff.

Talent doesn't substitute education in any kind of aspect. It enhances it, but that's it. You wouldn't be able to compose Beethoven's 9th (for example) if you weren't educated, trust me, no matter how talented you are. All of this is a rough overview since it's a bit more complicated than this, but I hope it clears some stuff up for people.