Composer Austin Wintory is one of a new generation of composers finding success in scoring video games. Wintory visited the WQXR studios during a trip to New York to present a live performance of his score for the game Journey, the first video game score to be nominated for a Grammy. You can hear him discuss the evolution of video game music in the audio clip above.

Wintory also composes for film as well as the concert hall, and he discussed the differences between these genres, along with some of his favorite musical artists working in each of these fields:

Film:

“People like to liken film music to opera and it's very much a false comparison, I think, because opera is about building an apparatus to showcase the music, to tell a story via the music, and most film is the diametric opposite of that. In most film, the music is one of many elements propping up a script. A lot of the variables are out of the equation of composing, for example, the duration of a given piece of music. In a film, each individual cue has a very specific frame-accurate length that is determined before you write. A great composer can play with the elements of the film; they don’t see themselves as vomiting music to a movie, but they see themselves as one of the filmmakers telling that story.

“John Powell is one the greatest film composers alive today, he wrote the music to How to Train Your Dragon. I heard him say once the reason he loves doing animated film over any other genre is it’s the only subarea in which you can express unapologetic joy in your music. He said that it reads as cheesy in every other movie — it reads as emotionally inauthentic — but when you’re flying on the back of a dragon through the clouds and you just decide to let loose, the audience will cry and be right with you.

Concert Hall:

"To me the concert is the vanguard for experimentation in certain ways and exploring emotion without the constraints of film. You can really genuinely tell a story and construct a musical arc. In the concert hall you are the entertainment, you are it, you are the thing. To whatever degree it's thought provoking, you did that; whatever degree it's emotional; everything lies at your feet, which, I think, causes this fear that keeps a lot of composers from genuinely getting vulnerable in their music.

“There’s a piece called Tenebrae, by Osvaldo Golijov. His son was looking at a model of the solar system, and he made this off-the-cuff very innocent childlike comment, like ‘we really all share our fate don’t we.’ [Golijov] was so struck by the beauty of his son realizing through this cosmic vantage this humanist outlook on life that he decided to write a piece inspired by it, and it’s a beautiful piece. It’s one of these quietly building but very emotionally stirring pieces that are angst free and more of just this beautiful childlike moment. I see very little of that in the concert world, so I always get excited when I discover something that does, because you look at what audiences love in the classical rep, and it’s the Beethovens and the Mahlers that are so emotional — Brahms and Schubert — they are the equivalents of Sinatra, someone who’s just crooning to the extreme.”

Video Games

“The thing about game music that separates it fundamentally from both film and concert music, and music throughout the entire history of mankind, is that the linear passage of time as a bedrock component of the film experience or the concert storytelling experience is up in the air. Games are driven by the player. Some games are very narrative driven, they have a very specific story, and they have a fairly predictable amount of time that they take to play. Some games are like Tetris where there’s no narrative whatsoever, and you play as long as you like. The game that I worked on, Journey, is 90 minutes to 2 hours, and then it’s done. The bottom line is the audience, the gamers are in charge.”

"Games can explore a genre a fiction that never existed. They allow you to crawl inside and act out someone you would never have known. For example there’s a game called The Last of Us. It takes place 20 years after the zombie apocalypse destroyed traditional infrastructure of government. The thing that’s so amazing about this game, and for which the music was a very central, is it gave you and insight into this broken man that you play. The Oscar-winner Gustavo Santaolalla, who won for the music to Brokeback Mountain and again for the movie Babel, wrote this. It’s the only game score that he has written, and it was so raw and barren and minimalist and it put you inside the head of Joel, the main character.”

This interview has been condensed and edited.