“Photocopying” Music

As a kid, I definitely thought of video game music as blips, bleeps, and nonsense sounds flitting about in sound-space; it never occurred to me that video game music could have the complexity, depth, and compositional genius that it does, even in something as simple-sounding as the Super Mario Brothers theme or as quick as Vampire Killer. This changed in middle school when I feasted upon Final Fantasy VII (yes, I got a late start, but I did delve into SNES games and am incredibly fond of Secret of Mana :).

At that point, I’d become both computer savvy (for the late 90s) and a little bored of all the classical music. Imagine my surprise and utter delight when I found game music? online? free? transcribed for piano? It was the MOTHER LODE and I was hooked. One catch: I couldn’t find Tifa’s theme, or the Golden Saucer song, or a lot of the other songs I wanted to play.

“Well, Mary, you have years of experience… you can figure this out, right?”

I remember spending days at my aunt’s place in Las Vegas transcribing music, note for note. I clearly see myself in their front room with the piano and a Walkman (YAY), hitting “play-rewind-play-rewind-play” and poking at the piano. I’d eventually written out the music for “Barret’s Theme,” “Tifa’s Theme,” “Gold Saucer,” and “The Prelude.” It was all flat by a half-step, though, because my Walkman was playing everything at the wrong speed.

The point of this? I don’t know. But I remember being really, really frustrated when I couldn’t figure out exactly which notes were being played at exactly what time. That kind of thing infuriated me. And sadly, it stopped me from doing things quickly, and with my own flair. I could have EASILY figured out the Final Fantasy Prelude thing. It’s just arpeggios. BUT NO. I had to have it exact, note for note. I had to know it was thirds, not triads. Whatever. It was probably triads in reality. Darn.

I was horrible at improvisation, probably precisely because I thought that it was “wrong” to not be exact. If I wasn’t photocopying the music in my head, I wasn’t giving it justice. To an extent, that’s okay. But with Hideo, and with jazz, and with so many musicians that I am absolutely in awe over and humbled by, there are no “exact” ways to play a tune, to get the melody, or to create a song. If I had realized this earlier (that “mistakes” are not necessarily mistakes), I’d have been able to create my own harmonies, arrange music, and step into a world that I didn’t get the opportunity to. I was too stuck on “perfection”.

Nowadays, I’ll add a few gestures that weren’t written, or change a phrasing or dynamic in the music (mostly because it’s too hard to play unless I simplify it :). But I know that I’m not (entirely) wrong – it’s part of the deal when you’re a performance artist, to take someone’s creation and do little things to make it your own.