The Music- Part 1- Alejandro Rodriguez

[MCM]

From the very first moment that I heard his work, I felt that Alejandro had a passion and intensity that was perfect for RTR. Other team mates whom I consulted all felt the same: each piece that he produced captured more and more of the 'mood' that we wanted to portray.

Soon you will have heard for yourself: when his striking melodies float across your campaign map for the first time, or you surge along with the troops in the game opening video, you will feel as if transported into another time and place.

Then, when his drums of battle call you urgently to prepare for war, it will get your heart rate pumping in anticipation.

There is a fierce, primeval spirit at work in Alejandro's music that captures your imagination.

Strident, thoughtful, haunting and wrathful, his music weaves the fabric of the human condition.

And now, for a brief glimpse at the man behind the music.

Please tell us a little about you. Who are you, where are you from and what do you do?
I have been a musician all my life, and have always been curious about the creative process in music. I am coming from a family of musicians, so from a young age I played several instruments. That inspired me to go into composition and create my own voice. Later on I got into the technical aspect of sound, and studied a career in music production and recording. The studio work opened my ears and eyes to all kinds of music styles. In my country of origin, Venezuela, I used to take apart the recordings I made and tried to learn what each musician was doing, specially the percussion players who played this complex polyrhythms, that give the music of Latin America its unique character. I had the advantage that I could interact with the musicians and ask them all kinds of questions while in the recording sessions. That world music background has definitively been the strongest influence in the music I compose. About six years ago I moved to Canada, and continued developing my career as a film, TV and new media composer.

How did you first hear about RTR?


I heard about the game through word of mouth, and then in a game music forum I found out that they were looking for a composer who could take the challenge of reproducing ancient roman music with a modern approach. I thought that it would fit exactly into my compositional style, so I contacted them.

What special challenges does writing for RTR give you? Who did you work most on the team?

Marc Atkinson, the head of the development team was my strongest ally. Together we discussed how the music should work. It was very important to maintain the raw musical elements, represented by ancient sounds, phrases, rhythms, etc to give the player the mood of the time period. The fact that the information on ancient roman music is limited opened the first challenge: we couldn’t do a 100% representation of something we didn’t know exactly how it sounded like, so we had to interpolate elements from ancient Mediterranean, African and European music. On the other hand we had the door opened to be creative. We soon agreed to combine ancient elements with new sounds and new western music, always keeping the raw material as building blocks for the compositions.


Since games are becoming more and more dependent on the emotive reaction of the player to in-game environmental stimuli, do you think that the nature of music for games is changing?


There is no question. Today’s players require that the music supports the emotion of the game, and that it follows as close as possible the random and infinite variations that a game could have. This, of course, represents a big challenge for the composition. With game music, there has to be the flexibility to go from one piece to the other as the game suddenly changes. This randomness of not knowing how long a piece of music should be, or when it will make its transition to a different piece represents the biggest challenge and fun at the same time. I personally had to design the music in “blocks” so that each block of music could make a smooth transition into another block, as the game would evolve.

What kind of concept did you apply when writing pieces for TIC?


Rome Total Realism is the name of the game, so therefore the first question before approaching the composition should be: How realistic should it be? Shall be go to “bare bones” raw music, or shall we add some spice to it? We shall add some spice to it, no question, so the idea was to combine old instrument sounds, music scales, phrases, rhythms, etc, with new music. One would probably think of some kind of a ethno-techno approach, but I decided to give it a twist. I thought: any instrument that we have never heard before will definitively sound new, even if it is an ancient instrument. So I played with that concept, mixing new with old sounds, new and old music, but in a way that it wasn’t that obvious to recognize what is new, and what is old.

Your campaign map pieces like’ atmosphere’ are really evocative. What kind of research did you to to get in ‘theme’ for the mod?


My first step was to look into ancient Greek music, which was the natural procedure, since the Greek culture was the strongest influence in the ancient roman republic and empire. This chapter “Total Iberian Conflict” takes place into what is nowadays Spain, so we decided to “induce’ some subtle Spanish elements to the music, even though the strong Spanish and flamenco elements that we know today appeared much latter in time. We gave us that little refreshing liberty and kept it subtle. African and Mediterranean music must have had also a strong influence in ancient Iberia, so there are also some subtle Arabic and Afro elements in the music.

You use a lot of rhythm in your pieces, and that really drives the on screen action along- is that intentional?

Yes, absolutely! We have to remember that the percussion was one of the first musical expression of the human being. From my point of view, the percussion, even if it is sophisticated, will usually induce us the image of nature, the origins, and that primitive and raw energy. Using the percussion as a feature element has another advantage when used in a video game: it is less prone to distract the player as a melody would be, this is of course a very subjective matter, but it usually works that way.
What is your hope for the future?

For several years, I have been a music composer for film, TV and multimedia, but this is the first time that I write music for a video game, and I found the experience to be fascinating. It is obvious that as technology develops, there will be a stronger demand to have high quality music on video games, this is already a fact, and as the public reacts, the game developers will have a stronger pressure to give the music the importance it deserves. I have been bitten by the bug! My strongest wish at the present time is to continue creating good music for video games.