In February of my freshman year, the Final Fantasy world tour came to Chicago. I obtained one of the last tickets just in time to take a 2-hour El ride to the Rosemont Theater before the performance. But upon speaking with other members of the sold-out crowd, I learned my journey was a pittance compared to that of other audience members.
Since the tour only reached Los Angeles and Chicago before leaving North America, fans had come unbelievable distances across the Midwest, Great Plains and near East Coast, just to attend the concert. One fellow I spoke to, who bore even more resemblance to Comic Book Guy than the rest of the crowd, had used a vacation day to drive from Cleveland and was driving home again after the concert. “If you had told me five years ago that one day I’d be seeing a concert of Uematsu’s works in the United States, I never would have believed it,” he told me.
He was referring, of course, to Nobuo Uematsu – the stocky, mustached Japanese composer who created the soundtracks for Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series since its inception in 1987. Starting composing for the highly-limited audio of the Famicom, Uematsu is one of the world’s best-known composers, and his works have been performed and arranged by major symphony orchestras and Celtic folk artists. Even a heavy-metal band covered his work.
Uematsu’s score to Final Fantasy VI, like John Williams’ Star Wars soundtrack, brought Wagnerian leitmotifs (individual themes for each character) into the public eye and inspired a new generation of young composers. Also like Williams, Uematsu would never make it as an academic composer today. He’s so old-fashioned, he’s not even a Neo-Classicist. Nope, he’s just a plain old Romantic, born 150 years too late. Uematsu’s work is not horribly innovative – he is at his best when he most closely imitates the past. Much of Uematsu’s most memorable work is reminiscent of Verdi or Mussorgsky’s major compositions.
Despite his limitations, however, Uematsu’s key position in the burgeoning video game industry gives him a critical say in how future generations will view orchestral music.
I was struck by the change when I attended the Final Fantasy world tour’s return to Rosemont last month: The theater did not sell out this time, but the make up of the audience was strikingly different. To be sure, there was still an assortment of nerds dressed as Red Mages and other things more suitable for a midnight showing of Lord of the Rings. But most of the audience looked pretty normal, and a shocking amount of them were (gasp) women! This suggests either that women are now playing Final Fantasy or at least that the men playing it are now well-adjusted enough to have a dating life.
Perhaps the novelty of a video game concert has worn off, but interest is now cementing within the cultural mainstream. As widespread attention to modern composition wanes, it may not be so long before we begin hearing National Public Radio play Uematsu instead of John Adams.
Music senior Braxton Boren can be reached at [email protected].
