Austin Wintory leads a performance of his Grammy-nominated score for the Journey video game. American Composers Orchestra performs for the interactive game at the Brooklyn Academy of music this week. Photo by James Estrin/The New York Times.
In Friday’s (12/6) New York Times, Annie Aguiar writes, “For each music cue in the dreamlike, solemn odyssey of the video game Journey, the engine tracking the player’s behavior pulls from a library of compositions, scoring a dynamic path through the game’s vast desert landscapes. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, [the American Composers Orchestra] is taking on the same task in Journey LIVE. In both performances, at least five game players will take turns using a controller to pilot a nameless robed figure through the online game, triggering music cues that the orchestra must perform in the moment … ‘I always like to tell people it will be like the most challenging wedding you’ve ever played,’ said Melissa Ngan, a flutist who has played in Journey LIVE several times and now” is president and chief executive of the American Composers Orchestra. “Austin Wintory’s Grammy-nominated score acts as a kind of narration … The musicians—21 players from the American Composers Orchestra and a solo cellist—are prepared to switch to the score’s jump points based on where a player decides to go in the game…. Some musicians use foot pedals to flip between the score’s pages on an iPad while others read off analog sheet music.”
