On a winter term whim last year, I decided to check the Conservatory Library for a book on video game music. My independent project that month was all about queer characters in games and I had time to kill, so I figured a tangentially related fruitless search would be the perfect distraction to get me out of my library carrel. To my surprise there was indeed a book on game music — in fact, there were several! Granted, not a whole lot more (seven in total), but that did allow me to say that I checked out the entire game music section for the spring. I realized that, much like they were for queer theory, video games are a viable source of musical academic discourse and analysis.
Ludomusicology (from the Latin ludus, for game, and musicology for…well, musicology) is a developing field that, although growing rapidly, is still rather small. To me, this was a boon rather than a barrier — unlike other fields of media studies such as, say, cinema, there was not a veritable library's worth of urtexts that one must read before contributing to the ongoing debate. Of course there are worthwhile things to be gleaned from the existing texts, but on the whole you’re largely on your own. Somewhat coincidentally, the very same day I happened to see a poster advertising Experimental College (exco) classes — these are student-led courses that you can take for half credit with topics ranging from taiko drumming to a history of anarchist art movements. The syllabus for LudomusicologyCo took me right up until the application deadline; I originally had something like thirty songs and five readings per class (this has since been paired down to only ten songs and a max of three readings…), and my weekly themes were… disorganized, to say the least. Still, somehow the exco board decided that I was good to go in the fall as is, so of course I spent the entire summer reworking the entire class.
Game music was my soundtrack for the season — I would end up wiping down tables to Kristofer Maddigan’s wonderfully quirky big band soundtrack from Cuphead, pondering how I was going to organize the next portion of my syllabus. Starting with 1975’s Gun Fight as the first game to feature music (a straight quotation of the funeral march from Chopin’s 1839 Piano Sonata No. 2 in Bb Major, but still!) and progressing all the way through Silksong (we live in hope for a release date…), I tried to hit as many game names, big and small, as possible. As of writing this we’re on our seventh class — LoFi week! — and have gone over everything from Borislav Slavov’s symphonic score for Baldur’s Gate III to the minimalist chiptune Bach-ism of Michiru Yamane in her tenure as the composer for Nintendo’s Nemesis BGM (to say nothing of the similarly styled compositional wizardry exhibited by Toby Fox from Undertale to Pokemon: Scarlet and Violet). Darren Korb’s theremin-centric prog-rock coded Halloween score of Hades is waiting for its day in the sun during modern ensemble week, and Lena Raine’s hauntingly beautiful flow state music for Celeste awaits us during the psychology of sound class. I’ll be the first to admit that there are large gaps in the course — which is where everyone else comes in!
At some point during the class, everyone enrolled has to present on a topic of their choice (so long as it relates to game music). This could be a specific game soundtrack, such as the brilliantly ethereal and disjointed Mosa Lina, or a genre as a whole, like JRPGs. Hell, you could even zero in on a specific instrument across game music as a whole — hurray for the organ, enabler of all wannabe Phantom of the Opera villains! The class has been an absolutely wonderful experience every week, which is completely thanks to the amazing people who are in it. They’ve taken an idea on paper and transformed it into a living, breathing space where different ideas, points of view, and methods of seeing the (game) world are put in conversation with each other in a genuinely wonderful way.
We still have a lot to get through (the 8-bit Big Band will close us out with an extended version of Mass Effect’s parody I am the very model of a Scientist Salarian), but if I had to reflect on the course so far and pick a favorite moment, I’d have to say bringing up that most delightfully kitschy of internet memes, Rush E. The ability to bring it up in an academic space and debate it with real gravity in the ideas has been an absolute treat, and by far my favorite take on the matter is that the song itself exemplifies the ideals of the postmodernist school of thought — wild and playful abandon for the world around us, while at the same time providing subtle political commentary. The worlds of game music have provided a fantastic space for people to explore soundscapes of (somewhat) surprising depth, and I am so happy that it exists.
