simonlife

I recently reactivated my World of Warcraft account for a month’s time in part because I wanted to re-live my former days as a healer (I play a Tauren shaman on the Kil’Jaeden realm), but also because I wanted to see the new level 60-to-70 content that was added in the Burning Crusade expansion. Admittedly, there is a huge danger in returning to a game like World of Warcraft, since—for anyone who doesn’t know—it is the kind of addiction that claims lives. Fear not though, for I’ve already cancelled my subscription, and my game time will effectively cease on January 15th, 2008, two days before I return to Cornell for the spring semester. This is a great game, and I may return to it once I am out of school, but for now, I am just trying to get the most out of it while I can.

Anyway, World of Warcraft is very much not the game it was a year or two years ago, and the musical score constitutes one of the more subtle changes that Blizzard has made. The opening track that accompanies the login screen features the same grand theme as before, only it has been re-orchestrated. For anyone well acquainted with the original orchestration (i.e. anyone who played the game before the expansion), the new rendition strikes the ear as having a fuller but more distant and perhaps less percussive sound. It makes greater use of choral chants, one of which is a direct quotation of the centuries-old Latin hymn, the Dies Irae.

When it finally struck me that what I was hearing was the Dies Irae, in the score for a computer game no less, I couldn’t help but smile. I took my hands off of the keyboard and thought about what it meant for this hymn to be quoted in this piece. It meant that somewhere out there, there is a composer, working in a genre questioned tirelessly for its artistic value, who understands the extra-musical significance and history of one of classical music’s most famous figures.

This was such a refreshing experience.