Video game music is notoriously difficult to play on acoustic instruments. Because it’s meant to increase engagement by playing in the background of some other task, it’s fast-moving and often features abrupt tempo changes — it is designed to be reproduced by a machine. Oberlin’s Video Game Cover Collective (VGCC) is up for the challenge. They’ll be playing their final concert of the semester at 8pm on May 5 at The Cat in the Cream.
The VGCC is currently run by co-presidents Camille Thorp and Charlotte Pavlic. The group fluctuates in size and membership, but generally consists of 30 to 40 musicians. “It’s a really incredible group of college and conservatory people,” Thorp said. “We take anyone, any instrument, any skill level.”
Pavlic explained more about this core tenet of the ensemble. “It’s really important to me that people from the college and the conservatory get to come together to play music that we enjoy without having to audition. We don’t say that you need to be a certain level of good. That’s not the vibe that we’re trying to create.”
The only requirement to join the collective is an instrument to play and a love for video games. “I’ve been listening to video game music since I was a kid, but I hadn’t started playing until I got here. I wasn’t aware that was a possibility,” Pavlic said. A euphonium player, Pavlic got her start playing video game music with Pokemon. “A large part of my musical taste as an adult human being has been informed by Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. It’s like classical, but with a little bit of jazz.”
A violinist, Thorp, followed a slightly different path. “My 2nd year, I tried the Art and Sciences Chamber Collective, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with that. It wasn’t the type of music I wanted to play,” she said. “It wasn’t fun in the way that this is.”
Both Pavlic and Thorp arrange music for the ensemble. Thorp enjoys the challenge of transcribing music from a machine to live instruments. “Honestly, it’s kind of a dream come true that we’re playing my arrangement of this Donkey Kong song,” she said. “That soundtrack is so funny and weird. It’s this mix of ambience, jazz, and weird jungle monkey noises. Just like complete nonsense.” Though more modern games are just as likely to have full instrumentation for their soundtracks, Thorp doesn’t back down from imitating the digital sounds that can be found in video game music. “It can be really cool to be like, here’s a song that was never meant to be played by my instrument,” she said.
In fact, making machine music playable is only half the battle. Because the VGCC doesn’t bar anyone from playing, the instrumentation of the group is highly variable. “You can’t write an orchestral score with one cello and three violins,” Pavlic said. “I mean, I’m a euphonium player, and we have a great saxophone section. I think that level of flexibility makes the arrangements really special. It is for this group of people. It is for what this group of people can play.”
The ensemble will play nine songs at their upcoming concert, eight of which were arranged by students. The setlist includes two medleys, two songs from Hollow Knight: Silksong, a smattering from Nintendo games, and a few outliers, including “Third Sanctuary” from Toby Fox’s Deltarune. Fox is fairly famous in the world of video game music, having also written music for Undertale as well as the popular webcomic Homestuck.
“Third Sanctuary” is comically complex with its notoriously inconsistent time signatures. A song’s time signature gives the performers information about how to count the rhythm. Most popular music has a time signature of 4/4, or four quarter notes per measure. “Third Sanctuary’s” time signature flips between 9/4, 11/8, 4/8, and 5/4. The song ends by alternating between 11/8 and 12/8, making the time signature of its last measures 23/8. Music like this is, quite frankly, impossible to count. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) its difficulty, it has been arranged by student Aurora Soh and will be performed by the ensemble this May 5.
The VGCC is in its fifth semester of operation, and it’s survived a change of leadership once already. However, once Thorp and Pavlic graduate this May, there will be no founding members of the ensemble left in its leadership. “I think we were both kind of apprehensive going into it because we do so much scheming together,” Thorp said, “and we’re like, how is anyone else possibly gonna do this again? But we thought the same thing last year when Victoria left. I know they’re gonna make something work next semester.”
Because the VGCC membership changes from semester to semester, and the arrangements that students write are based on the current instrumentation of the ensemble, there will never be another show quite like the one on May 5. If you have the spirit of an adventurer, you won’t want to miss this concert.
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