For each music cue in the dreamlike, solemn odyssey of the video game Journey, the enginetracking the player’s behavior pulls from a library of compositions, scoring a dynamic paththrough the game’s vast desert landscapes.
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, a live orchestra is taking on the same task in Journey LIVE. In both performances, at least five players will take turns using a controller to pilot a nameless robed figure through the online game, triggering music cues that the orchestra must perform in the moment as the player progresses through the story or takes unexpected detours.
“I always like to tell people it will be like the most challenging wedding you’ve ever played,”said Melissa Ngan, a flutist who has played in Journey LIVE several times and now leads the orchestra playing the show at BAM. “Many of us remember those moments early in our lives where we played wedding after wedding, and you just have to have one eye on the ensemble and your music, and the other eye on what’s happening down the aisle.”
Journey is a wordless game, and Austin Wintory’s Grammy-nominated score acts as a kind of narration as the robed figure follows traces of an ancestral civilization through the sun-dappled desert and into the bowels of structures that once teemed with life.
Though roughly linear, the game has no explicit missions. The narrative unfolds as the player explores different landscapes. The game’s eight major sections are each broken into three scenes, and each of those contain up to seven musical jump points.
The score is an evolving soundscape, moving from mournful cello and oboe to sprightly pizzicato plucking of strings to a shimmering harp. That means the orchestra must prioritize continuity, a unique challenge in a field where concertos and symphonies are neatly divided into discrete movements.
“The musicians have to learn a way of thinking more than they have to learn the notes on the page,” said Wintory, who is conducting Journey LIVE at BAM.
The musicians — 21 players from the American Composers Orchestra and a solo cellist — are prepared to switch to the score’s jump points based on where a player decides to go in the game. (A soprano is also present to perform the vocal sections of the score’s final track.) Wintory relays that information to the orchestra with hand signals as he watches the screen behind them.
To indicate the next segment, Wintory holds up a certain number of fingers; he confirms the transition for the next downbeat with a thumbs up. Some musicians use foot pedals to flip between the score’s pages on an iPad while others read off analog sheet music that shows entire movements. A segment can last only seconds or several minutes.
Skipping around is common. While the orchestra rehearses all possible pieces of music that a player could prompt, Wintory said that maybe one in 10 players would explore in enough detail to require a snippet for a tower hidden to the side of the game world.
“The player takes on a curatorial role as well as the role of the conductor,” said Dan Visconti, the former artistic director for Fifth House Ensemble who is now a producer for Journey LIVE. “It’s exciting to see people from all walks of life be able to come up and effectively conduct an orchestra.”
The show premiered in 2016 at MAGFest, an annual convention in Maryland dedicated to video games and their soundtracks. Earlier iterations were played by Fifth House, a former Chicago group co-founded by Ngan, who is now the president and chief executive of the American Composers Orchestra.
That it has arrived at BAM is a sign of the growing profile of video game music and the push for arts institutions to cultivate relationships with nontraditional audiences. “With Journey LIVE, we bring together two distinct audiences — gaming aficionados and orchestral music fans,” BAM’s artistic director, Amy Cassello, said in a statement.
Video game music has been considered a novelty in orchestral spaces, and is even the punchline punishment for Cate Blanchett’s disgraced conductor in the 2022 film “Tár.” If that perception is changing, it is not an exaggeration to cite Journey as a reason.
Journey, which was released for the PlayStation 3 in 2012, is a frequent answer to the question of whether video games can be art. It was the first video game score to receive a Grammy nomination, for best score soundtrack for visual media. Wintory competed with luminaries like Hans Zimmer (“The Dark Knight Rises”) and John Williams (“The Adventures of Tintin”) in a category won by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
The Journey LIVE experience is not an exact copy of what a player would hear in the game because Wintory makes decisions on what will work best in the moment. That could mean delaying a transition by a half-second or slowing down the tempo for a smoother handoff to a location-based music cue.
One of the highlights of Journey is the player’s interaction with kind figures in white robes who guide them through terrain and hidden corners. They are actually other players somewhere else in the world choosing to help other players and they remain unidentified until the game’s end credits, which include the screen names of everyone met along the way.
At Journey LIVE, where that reveal plays out in front of the audience, it means a graceful orchestral flourish can punctuate a shout-out to the contributions of “PeePants123.”
That example is not theoretical. Ngan said someone in the audience at that performance was able to connect with PeePants123, a white robe who said, “I had no idea that I was on the stage in front of 500 people, and I haven’t been able to change my screen name since I was 13.”
Though the spontaneity of a live player, like the ones in the Journey LIVE performances, is an intriguing premise, Wintory said the idea was to center the player onstage and treat that person like a senior conductor or a concerto soloist, not as a novelty. “The goal is not to make it sort of a circus act,” he said.
But the high-wire pressure remains: The players are given no instructions, and no part of the gameplay is choreographed. BAM identified its onstage players through an online submission form, seeking those deeply familiar with the game to drive the show forward.
Journey is rife with secrets, but the players are reminded that they are in front of a live audience that does not have all night to watch them stress test the orchestra’s responsiveness. If players move somewhat promptly through the game, Journey LIVE runs for about 90 minutes.
“Don’t try to platinum the game on this one,” Wintory said, a joking reference to the digital trophy players get when they fully complete a PlayStation game.
Kellee Santiago, the co-founder and former president of the Journey developer thatgamecompany, has seen Journey LIVE twice and suggested a different approach.
“Pause for an oddly long amount of time at one place in the game,” she said. “There’s always something that you hear in the music in those moments that is delightful and surprising.”
