If you know me and my perspective on music, it should not surprise you that I am a fan of genre crossovers – at least when done well. It’s easy to point fingers at bad examples and (mis)judge the entire concept, but that is unfairly reductive. Nor have I yet seen convincing arguments for genre purity (in fact, thinking about “purity” gives me the heebie-jeebies). No – if done well, I think that good mash-ups can yield results that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Looking back on my childhood, I surrounded myself with what was effectively crossover music well before I was aware of the label. A typical characteristic of old, synthesized video game music is its eclecticism, with music composers and programmers consciously as well as intuitively pulling together bits and pieces from anything and everything to create suitable music for their games.
One of my favourite composers growing up – famed Japanese game composer Nobuo Uematsu, known primarily for his contributions to the long-running Final Fantasy series – is one such polystylist. It is fun to go back and pick apart Uematsu’s early game compositions, picking out the different styles he employs. However, last month, jazz pianist and prolific YouTube creator Charles Cornell published a rather comprehensive and very entertaining presentation of one of Uematsu’s most famous compositions, “One-Winged Angel”, and its various progenitors.
Another living example of a crossover project is the Finnish cello trio (formerly a quartet) Apocalyptica. Founded in 1993, when I was eight years old, the four cellists met at the prestigious Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and started playing Metallica covers together. What started out as a fun side project quickly blossomed into a wildly successful band in its own right with ten studio albums to date featuring both covers and original music composed by and for the ensemble.
I stumbled over Apocalyptica in my early teens as I was exploring various flavours of hard rock and heavy metal. These excursions led me variously to discoveries such as the absolutely brilliant German band Blind Guardian and the mind-blowing (to me, at least) double-album/double-entendre, S&M or “Symphony and Metallica”: a live recording with the aforementioned band and the San Francisco Symphony led by conductor-composer Michael Kamen.
I vividly remember initially having strong but conflicting feelings over S&M. Growing up in a sort of musically conservative family, this seemed to my teenage mind almost like an unholy union of feverish electric guitars and drums and impassioned outbursts of strings, winds and brass. At the same time, the aesthetically balanced musical diet I had already been feeding myself kind of prepared me for what I was offered here. I was also already familiar with Michael Kamen through his work as a film composer.
A decade after S&M opened a door in me that could never quite be shut again, I paid an implicit tribute to it at my music college when I scored the intermission for the 2009 semi-finals of “SMASK”, the annual music competition between Sweden’s six music colleges, originally a parody of the Eurovision Song Contest. For the dance number performed during the jury’s deliberations, I took what is still one of my all-time favourite a cappella choral works – Kung Liljekonvalje by David Wikander, after the eponymous poem by Gustaf Fröding – and gave it the Michael Kamen treatment, so to speak.
The idea of purposefully mixing different ideas is still an integral part of my musical identity. I used to be slightly ashamed of it, as if it was in fact a kind of sign of musical impurity, or more charitably of immaturity. However, I have fortunately shed myself of that shame. It didn’t even rattle me when a distinguished composition professor questioned why I included extended playing techniques – most commonly found in more experimental, modernist art music – in my more neo-classically inspired sonata for bassoon and piano. I don’t remember exactly what I answered him, but it was something to the effect of “why not?”.
Last year, inspired by meeting the American string quartet Triforce Quartet at the video game music festival MAGFest, I wrote an arrangement for string quartet of two music tracks from the 1984 arcade game Marble Madness. The game’s original music, composed by the late Brad Fuller and Hal Canon, is also a great example of game composers borrowing from near and far – including hard rock, variety music, and even Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring.
There is no official soundtrack that I know of, but you can listen to the original versions of the two songs in my arrangement on YouTube, here and here. For my arrangement, I wanted to both stay true to the original songs and adapt them to make good use of the ensemble and its possibilities, aiming for that well-balanced stylistic alloy that is the hallmark of the best crossover projects. The audio file above is a simple synth mock-up; I hope some ensemble will pick it up soon and put it on their repertoire!