The renowned Belgian composer Stefan Prins has also dedicated part of his work to exploring the dynamics of gaming within the realm of audiovisual compositions, aiming to investigate how the correlations between technological progress and society can be addressed through the use of sound and video. His concerns focus particularly around the consequences and influences of new technologies on society, often with a strong and present political critique. Once again, aesthetic references lean more towards video games than games in a general sense.
In his piece Piano Hero 1, part of the larger cycle Piano Hero, for MIDI keyboard, live electronics, and video, Prins used the basic setup of a solo piano performance, but added an important detail: the performer is not responsible for producing the acoustic sounds, which are instead generated through previous sampling and arbitrarily associated with the keys of the MIDI keyboard. Essentially, Prins transforms the (seemingly) acoustic piano into a "reproducer" instrument, a MIDI keyboard, almost closer to a button-operated speaker than a genuine instrument. Considering the classical music world's reverence for the grand piano, the principal instrument of Romanticism, an era that shaped the sensitivity still underlying Western culture, the author has committed heresy by daring to touch such a sacred monster to create a demon from it. All the skills that a pianist takes decades to develop, such as touch, weight, dynamics, and so on, are completely nullified and rendered meaningless, effectively reducing the musician to a mere reproducer. Much closer to the kids who go wild in arcades on dance pads to follow the rhythms of the songs presented to them on screens than to a refined interpreter bearing his own, unique, and personal musical thought. The title alludes to a once very popular video game, Guitar Hero, one of the "rhythm games" discussed in previous chapters. Guitar Hero requires players to use guitar-shaped controllers and match the notes of famous rock songs and guitar solos by pressing the right keys at the right time, in a continuous and automatic cycle that depersonalizes the game user. This system is as far removed as possible from the idea of a true musician, given the difference between conscious musical performance and a mere execution based on reproducing a sequence of keys, regardless of the sound produced. For Prins, the pianist is thus an avatar, whose "presence [...] live is overshadowed by the oversized projection of the pianist's actions on the screen."1
Piano Hero is defined as “an immersive cycle for midi-keyboard, grand piano, live-cameras, video and live-electronics (2011-…)”, using the word “immersive” in a sense explained by a quote that goes: "Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment, often artificial. This mental state is frequently accompanied with spatial excess, intense focus, a distorted sense of time, and effortless action.” Even though it sounds like a potentially interesting condition, upon examining the composer's other statement, it appears that this “immersiveness” quality is not perceived here as an altered state revealing something, or a relaxing experience, but rather as a depersonalization of the self of the individual. “Piano Hero #1 is the point zero of the Piano Hero cycle: the pianist becomes a mere operator in a world of bits and bytes.” This relates also to his concerns about the political use of technology “against” society. A highly critical perspective, rooted in the awareness that misuse of this vast quantity and excessive, unconscious use of technology may not only bring benefits. Prins sees the piano and the player as instrument to showcase his views, as tools “to fully articulate the tension between the real and the virtual”. It is not a vision far from reality, both in the context of the game itself (primarily referring to the original Guitar Hero, which doesn't aim to create a personal performance or develop critical and/or interpretative dimensions, nor does it have a genuine educational intention) and in a broader social dimension. From this perspective, it becomes evident that for Prins, at least in this instance, the specificity of the gaming medium serves solely for its contextual significance, functioning as a tool to serve a larger conceptual aim.
Another work by the same composer that visually evokes the dimension of video games even more clearly is Generation Kill, for percussion, electric guitar, violin, cello, 4 musicians with game controllers, live electronics & live video. Generation Kill was first performed at the Gaudeamus Festival in 2012 and contains a very clear reference to the video game world, manifested through the use of actual joysticks during the performance. Four members of the Nadar Ensemble (violin, cello, electric guitar, and percussion) are positioned behind transparent screens; in front of them are four performers with PlayStation controllers, which allow the recording, playback, and manipulation not only of the sounds produced by their colleagues but also of their images: the performers had to deal with overlapping video projections, sometimes sped up, of what they were doing a moment before. This is perhaps the most ruthless example of man-machine opposition, with a ruthless competition for the listener's attention, which, quite rightly, Alex Ross comments on as follows: "alarmingly difficult to distinguish what was real from what was virtual" and "as if Philip K. Dick had written a novel about chamber music.”2 Additionally, a deeper level of interpretation emerges within the ludic-musical dimension. In this piece, the controllers fuse the performer's gaming experience with an image akin but vastly distinct: that of drones, "unmanned aerial vehicles" remotely operated by soldiers in military control centers across the United States.
Strolling through the internet, I found at around the same time a 7-year old video-clip on Youtube which was a teaser for the TV-series "Generation Kill", based on the homonymous book in which Evan Wright chronicled his experiences as an embedded reporter with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the US Marine Corps during the 2003 Iraq invasion. One of the statements which shocked me the most was made by one of the soldiers: "It's the ultimate rush -- you're going into the fight with a good song playing in the background". Evan Wright explained further: "This is a war fought by the first playstation generation. One thing about them is they kill very well in Iraq."
At that point, I realised that my next piece had to musically reflect on all of these connected facts, on a society which is more and more monitored, on the increasing importance of internet, networks and social media, which are fuelled by video's taken with webcams and smartphones, on video-games and on wars fought like video-games, on the line between reality and virtuality which gets thinner by the day.
Prins's investigation thus stands at the intersection of video games, technology, and global conflicts, critically positioning itself at the heart of some of the most pressing issues of contemporary times. Particularly significant is also the "struggle" between the two groups of performers, harsh and particularly chaotic, as if the eight musicians were not part of the same team but rather fighting among themselves for the audience's attention, in a dimension that further represents the complexity of the technologized and mediated world, symbolizing an intertwining of virtuality and reality that seems to have become a new reality itself. In short, it is effectively "a great musical massacre."
Social and political critique are certainly not new topics in the musical landscape - actually, the opposite. They populate aesthetic debates and artistic productions since time immemorial, almost evolving similarly, in the enjoyment of a certain freedom of expression and amplification of emotions which protests, rebellions, and socio-economic disputes widely utilize. This choice cannot be considered particularly innovative; what is surprising, however, is the medium through which Prins has chosen to convey this rhetoric. Games, indeed, as mentioned many times now, enjoy a very specific status within the cultural world and, more generally, in the history of humanity: straddling between lightness and seriousness, between trivial entertainment activities and fundamental anthropological-cultural manifestations, they embody universal values, representing both conscious and unconsciously repressed archetypes, which sometimes harken back, if not to childhood, at least to a moment of carefreeness and lack of those worries and dramatic issues belonging to the political and social world. It is therefore in this apparent contradiction that Prins's poetic insinuates itself, in this conceptual charge of objects so emotionally relevant to contemporaneity, therefore imbued with a message technically far removed from their context and nature, but actually deeply connected. Prins reminds the audience of how some privileges and conditions of wealth actually obscure underlying issues, which may appear deeply concealed or deliberately ignored - almost like children actively seeking to evade or hide from the harsh realities passively endured. The game represents the desire to remain in a childish condition, in the cotton wool where free fun has no consequence, but through which a design of commodification, exploitation, and overpowering is actually carried out. The emotional scope of the instrument representing an innocent game associated with real events, connected to it but diverted from the gaze of the average Westerner, is the key to the effectiveness, both conceptual and musical, of Stefan Prins's compositions.