Canberra Connexion Big Band members are taking an experimental leap into the world of video gaming in their next concert.

They’re inviting audience members to  dress up as their favourite computer game character and enjoy themselves. 

The band will feature music from video games such as Mario Brothers, Portal, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Fallout, Cuphead and Undertale, all reimagined with a big band twist.

Traditionally, big band music has a comfortable, easy-listening feel about it, but with the universal rise in popularity of video gaming, symphony orchestras around the world have eagerly embraced the idea of large-scale concerts of the music specially composed for games.

Connexion Big Band sax-player and composer Bryan Hooley tells me the venture started over a cup of coffee when a couple of members who were “that way inclined” suggested gaming music as a way to garner new audiences. 

Hooley says he wasn’t initially “that way inclined”, but that he has played a bit of Tetris in his time, so was prepared to play catchup.

Video gaming has provided a new arena for talented composers, many of them Japanese, whose resulting scores are sometimes edgy but more often lush and romantic.

Big names include Koji Kondo, who composed the music for Super Mario and Legend of Zelda and Nobuo Uematsu, composer of Final Fantasy VII, which features climactic fight music which has been favourably compared to that of film music legend John Williams. 

Closer to home, the ANU’s Prof Kenneth Lampl is an internationally-known gaming composer whose first feature length commissions were for the scores of Pokémon: The First Movie and Pokémon: Mewtwo Returns.

As well, in 2018 at the Canberra International Music Festival – under the baton of Leonard Weiss – the full Canberra Youth Orchestra performed video game music in Game On! The Digital Revolution, into a packed audience at Llewellyn Hall, which was full of gamers on their devices while listening to the music.

“When we started to look at the possibilities, we found there were quite a lot of arrangements of video music,” Hooley says, especially by the Grammy winning American band The 8-Bit Big Band, a 30-65-member jazz/pops orchestra of mostly New Yorkers who have made a speciality of this genre.

“They’re happy for us to use their arrangements,” he says, so in a cheeky kind of homage, Connexion have given their concert the name, “64-Bit Big Band Videogame Music Night.”

Musical director of Connexion, Justin Buckingham, developed a playlist and added some strings to give it a fuller sound and a couple of other members arranged their own bits. 

“Suddenly we realised we had two sets worth,” Hooley says, adding that happily for him, they’re including a bit of the hugely popular soundtrack from Tetris.

They haven’t completely worked out how personal devices will fit into the concert, but the initiative is, after all, a learning experience.

One thing is certain, however – “a lot of gamers know the music very well.”

Connexion Big Band’s 64-Bit Big Band Videogame Music Night, Harmonie German Club, September 14.