While I was in my car and flipping through radio stations one day, a broadcast on Classical 101 caught my attention. The subject of the program was the effects of video game soundtracks on the classical music genre. The hosts were discussing their opinions on the ways that classical music was shaping the soundtracks to games, and vice versa.
I'm not going to lie, I came of age during the Mario era. A weekend moment was considered wasted if it was not spent helping the famous plumber defeat Bowser and rescue Princess Peach. To this day, the infamous theme song still puts a smile on my face.

However, those days happened about fifteen years ago. My opinions on video games drastically changed once I met my husband. A self-proclaimed geek, Jimmy and his friends mainly communicate via computers and the internet, and consider gaming together online, whilst in separate locations, "hanging out together." Our home office has become one of those lovely man caves, where one can barely wade through multiple monitors, joy sticks, microphones, sound systems, and hard drive towers. Needless to say, the video game world has become the enemy. Not surprisingly enough, ALL of the mothers of my male teenage students agree.

You can probably understand why when I first started listening to this radio program I rolled my eyes. All hail the mighty world of technology. Yet, I started thinking deeper into the matter as the program went on. Did you know that there are entire symphonic orchestras dedicated to playing such works as the themes from Halo, Dragon Wars, and the Legend of Zelda? Neither did I. Also, the National Endowment for the Arts has decided that video games are now able to qualify for arts grants.

As technology continues to evolve, so does the world of music. As a pianist, I came across this as a very small music student when I first encountered the "digital vs. acoustic piano" debate. I've realized that many of my students are becoming interested in new styles of music because of their presence in something "cool." Furthermore, as games continue to incorporate these cinematic and fully orchestrated works new questions keep arising. For example, what qualifies a piece as classical music these days?

In evaluating the skills and tastes of my students and friends, I can see the effect of the video game world. One student began practicing transcribing songs so that he could learn to play one of the themes from Kirby. An old friend of mine once decided he wanted to learn the cello so that he could play a creepy, yet gorgeous, solo from Silent Hill. Most recently, a fourteen year old student of mine performed two pieces from the game Mine Craft at our fall showcase. One of them, Wet Hands, is the most beautiful selection I've ever heard him play in over two years.

However, this same student alerted me to some of the dangers of this new influence. As game designers choose to incorporate this music, many of them are finding that they no longer need to rely on actual musicians. With the world of technology at their fingertips, some of this music has been composed electronically, with the computer performing the pieces. My student showed me one such piece and begged me to teach it to him. I had to disappoint him. No human, without arpeggiating the chord or using a third arm, could play a seventeenth simultaneously in both hands. After listening to the recording, I will concede that the song was fantastic, but that concerns me even more. As technology advances will the human musician become obsolete? The pianist in me says absolutely not. Nothing will ever beat the sound of a live person on a Steinway grand. The part of me whose students request to sing pieces by Auto-Tuned "musicians"- that's the part of me that's not so sure.