Austin Wintory Got Game
Austin Wintory is a composer for film and video games. He will be joining Symphony New Hampshire this weekend as guest conductor of Game Over(ture).
Meet Austin Wintory
Meet Austin Wintory. He is a composer or as he says, a person who is professionally curious about music. He tells me he spends seven days a week trying to solve musical problems.
Wintory has composed scores for film and video games including Stray Gods, Sword of the Sea, Journey, Abzu, Pathless, LEGO Fortnite, ACSyndicate.
Wintory will be guest conductor for part of Symphony New Hampshire’s upcoming concert Game Over(ture) taking place this weekend, March 23 (Concord) and March 24 (a matinee in Nashua).
Claim to fame?– starting point – Journey
“Without question, this would be the Sony PlayStation game Journey that came out in March of 2012.”
Twelve years ago, almost exactly (to the day of our conversation), it was released on March 13, 2012. The game was a relatively small project. It was a small team, small budget. And it was also very unusual in the world of games because it was less than two hours long.
Journey was the first-ever Grammy-nominated video game score and that nomination dragged him into the limelight. Yet, what caught my attention were the words, curiosity and experimentation sitting on his website.
Curiosity and Experimentation
He agrees those words “broadly unite everything” he has done. In particular, he looks at the notion of experimentation where his rule is, “when I finish a project, I want to feel like, at minimum, it’s something that I have never tried before. Now, ideally there’s bonus points if it’s something that it feels like no one’s ever tried before, but at minimum, it has to be something that I’ve never tried before.”
“Perpetual frontiers!” he says. Just like video games and real life, I respond. And you couldn’t ask for a better time for curiosity and experimentation. The whole world is in change mode. Every day we encounter new facets of artificial intelligence, automation, and acceleration of change in a digital world.
Connection to Symphony New Hampshire
For me, curiosity and experimentation are words that immediately bring to mind Roger Kalia and Symphony New Hampshire’s current season. Symphony Masala, East meets West with Sandeep Das and also the Fiddler’s Tale all speak to their willingness to re-center what we should view as classical symphonic music. These are different, scary and exciting times.
Symphony NH upcoming concert, Game OVER(true), is a symphonic journey through the music of video games. Austin Wintory will guest conduct part of the concert taking place this coming weekend March 23rd (Concord Capitol Center for the Arts) and March 24th (matinee Nashua).
Austin Wintory’s connection to Symphony NH is quite simple. Conductor Roger Kalia and he are friends.
Kalia and Wintory’s Running Score
Roger and I have been friends for many years, and he’s conducted Journey many times, probably more than any other single conductor beyond myself. I’ve been lucky that the music has been performed a lot over the years, but Roger has seen to it that the Pacific Symphony and the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra has done it. His orchestra. He has another group, the Evansville Philharmonic Indiana, that has done it. And he’s just been a very lovely supporter. And I love working with him. He’s a terrific conductor.
Why Attend if you are not interested in Classical Music?
This concert is a challenge much like video games; much like what Jeff Rapsis does composing and performing music around our community to accompany a silent film.
There is the opportunity for spontaneity and experiencing something different, hearing music you likely have never heard performed live.
Wintory will be conducting his music plus one other that he just kind of cherry-picked off Kalia’s setlist. They do that quite often as you’ll hear in our conversation:
“Can I conduct this? I’d like that one. That one sounds fun. I’ve never done that one. It should be. It should be good.”
GG
“I just kind of went shopping on the set list”
“Yeah. I’ll be conducting my music plus one other that has become a bit of a staple in the world of game music. That was part of a game that came out in 1998 called Final Fantasy Seven. It’s sort of one of the enduringly very popular works called “One-Winged Angel,” and I just basically asked Roger, what else are you planning on performing? And he’s done this for me in the past where I just kind of went shopping on the set list.”
KS
And this concert is another opportunity to demonstrate what Symphony New Hampshire is capable of doing. Rush (look it up.) It’s the full range of the instruments, the players, the conductor, the orchestra.
