Interview with Arnie Roth

Arnie Roth has conducted several game music concerts over the last couple of years. First he did Dear Friends and More Friends in the US, then a lot of Play! A Video Game Symphony concerts all over the world, Voices: Music from Final Fantasy in Japan 2006 and now he is the producer of the Distant Worlds tour. We met Arnie after the Play! A Video Game Symphony concert in Lilleström, Norway October 26.

How did the idea of Distant Worlds come up and how did it become reality?

- I met Nobuo Uematsu when I conducted the Dear Friends tour, which started in the end of 2004. He and I worked together several times – he came to several of the concerts. And then we also worked together on the More Friends concert in Los Angeles 2005. And then Square Enix asked me to conduct the Voices concert. They and Nobuo Uematsu invited me to Japan in 2006. After that, they approached me and my good friend Thomas Böcker and told us that they would prefer the two of us to produce this tour.

Which countries are you planning to visit?

- We will do concerts all over the globe. There are concerts being planned right now with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, in Seoul (South Korea) and Kuala Lumpur in Singapore. I will also be doing the US premier March 1 next year with my orchestra in Chicago. And we are looking at dates for New York, Los Angeles, Canada, and Europe as well. It’s a three year tour, so it will go all the way through December 31 2010. It will be a big tour.

We know that there are a lot of game music fans in Finland. Maybe a concert in Helsinki?

- I think there are discussions right now with Helsinki for Play, and certainly that might be possible for the Final Fantasy concert as well at some point, but I heard just recently that they are talking to the orchestra in Helsinki about Play so that could happen next year. They are also talking about coming back here [to Norway] and doing a little tour of Scandinavia - Bergen, maybe Gothenburg, in the fall of 2008.

Any comments on the two Play events in Stockholm?

- The Stockholm concerts were fantastic. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic is a magnificent orchestra. I had a fantastic time with them, every time I conducted them. To compare the two concerts, we did some new scores this year. It was the first time we did the Amiga and Commodore 64 medleys, and those were very well-received and fun to do. We will probably do them in a few other places, not so much in the US. I think that Stockholm was a fantastic hit and it was really well-received.

Tell us about the recording of the Distant Worlds CD in Stockholm.

- It was in August, and we did it over three days. This was a joint effort by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and my company, AWR Music Productions. And Thomas Böcker actually came out and was with me there. It’s a fantastic record, it’s 75 minutes long which is at the very limit of manufacturing of a CD. It has “Maria and Draco“ on it, “Distant Worlds“, the original FFI-III medley. A lot of things that hasn’t been released outside of Japan. It’s really fantastic performances and Uematsu-san has already heard all the mixes and he says it’s a fantastic record. He’s in love with it already!

Will the CD be available in record stores or will it only be available through the website?

- The CD will be available for sale starting on December 4, in Stockholm. And the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, as artists on the CD, will be selling it in their retail store at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Outside of that, currently it will only be available on our website and at the Distant Worlds concerts.

I think it has the possibility to be the first ever game music concert CD to be released worldwide.

- I agree it does, and certainly we will make it available for sale on the website.

I was more thinking about making it available in record stores.

- It’s worth thinking about. It’s a different world right now with selling records. In the US, I think I read that something like 30 % of total record sales are being done in retail. The rest of it is being done either by online downloads or purchases through online stores like Amazon. So we really have to think carefully about whether it makes any sense to make it available in retail stores. Do you think so?

The most people who are interested in buying it probably already know about the website, so I guess that’s the best way to sell it. Getting it to record stores is rather about getting the public more aware of game music.

- I understand that, but on the other hand record stores have so little respect for so much music right now - it’s not just game music. They won’t stock classical or jazz. So yes, you can say that this has the potential to be quite a big release, but you know, they typically don’t stock back-catalog so let’s say that they take it in for 6 months and then they won’t keep it anymore. So it’s hard to rationalize doing that. We can keep it for sale for many many years. But undoubtedly there will be some distribution in certain territories where we will allow that to happen. But we want to make it available to the entire world through the website.

Back to the Play concert. How was it performing in an exhibition hall?

- I have done a lot of this, both classically and pop and rock and things like that. The thing is, there is no acoustics - you have to build it. When you come in, there is a big empty room. So you bring in the stage, the equipment and so on. As a performer, you’re in the hands of the front of house mixer. We can do the best performance on stage, but if the front of house mixer doesn’t have a good concept balance-wise of the orchestra, it might not be successful. In this case, he did a very good job, but I can’t say how critical it is to have a good front of house mixer. For instance, in Stockholm I could control the dynamics in the concert hall, but here it is out of our hands - we can play softly or loud - if the mixer turns the lever up or down, it’s up to them. Having said all that, it was a very good concert [in Norway].

I guess the crowd did its part, too?

- If you do a lot of these concerts and have a lot of experience doing this, then you can expect to come in here and know that when 3 000 or 4 000 will show up, it will dry up the acoustic a bit, it won’t be so “boomy” and resonant. Which is a good thing.

Do you have any relation to video games other than the music - are you a gamer?

- I can’t tell you that I’m a gamer, but have I played video games? Yes, I have. I played some of the early Nintendo games, but when we started working with Uematsu, we brought in Final Fantasy VII and wanted to play it and get our hands on the music. I have ultimate respect for Uematsu-san as a composer and there are certain basic building blocks of all this music that he has entrusted me with in terms of performing it live. He likes what I’ve done with his music, and musically it does more for me to listen to his recorded versions of these themes, sometimes with sampler, or sometimes with rock band or full symphony. But listening to the way he performed it, the feeling of the melody and then trying to apply that to the orchestra track, that’s the challenge for me.

Nobuo Uematsu is for the most part self-thought when it comes to composing, right?

- Yes, he is very much self-thought. But he continues to learn and grow, and the best thing about any artist is when they are looking to learn. And he has been a master at that. If you look at all the Final Fantasy music, from 1987 until today, how many changes he has gone through and adapted and look for the common thread. What is it that Uematsu is doing the same, what are the similarities - it may be a rock band, a full symphony or a chorus - the similarities are his strength in melody. That’s the important thing. There are other composers who are working on effects, atmospheric things, or maybe just action - painting a palette - less melody-driven, more orchestration-driven. He is more melody-driven and the orchestration serves the melody and the structure. I’m not saying one is better than another, but he has been very consistent in that way.

Do you have anything to say to the Swedish audience coming to the Final Fantasy concert December 4?

- The audience in Sweden has been so great to me on all of the concerts that I’ve done there and I just want to tell everyone how excited I am to have Stockholm as the world premiere of this new tour. I have to thank the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, they’ve been fantastic. And the audience. I know there’s been a lot of different concerts in or around Sweden recently. So I’m very thankful and impressed that the Swedish audience wants to be there and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone. It’s going to be a fantastic concert.

Is there a possibility that you will return to some of the tour locations for a second concert?

- Theree’s no question that we may come back to certain places. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra has some plans of touring as well, so we may possibly join them on something, where they might do a couple of traditional classical concerts and one Final Fantasy concert or something like that. So we’ll see. Because they are on the recorded CD, it would be a wonderful thing to be able to do this again with them. But right now we concentrate on December 4th.

Interview Conducted by Johan Köhn [2007-12-03]