Word: samuragoch
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Just listen to the score for Capcom's Onimusha, released for Sony's PlayStation 2 last year. Composer Mamoru Samuragoch, 37, created a rich, textured symphony that elevates a game with a mundane plot--a samurai must rescue a princess from a bunch of demons--into a story of epic proportions. To record it, Samuragoch browbeat the producers into employing a 200-piece orchestra, including musicians playing such traditional instruments as a Japanese flute and taiko drums. The result is both haunting and inspirational, reminiscent of majestic scores for films like Lawrence of Arabia. "In the 20th century, film became...
Born in Hiroshima, Samuragoch was so precocious that, at age 5, as his mother tells him, he was creating compositions for the marimba. Samuragoch himself remembers composing his own music at age 10. Although he studied piano as a child, he didn't have much formal training and taught himself to compose. He is a traditionalist, a student and an admirer of such Western composers as Beethoven and Mozart, and he is dismissive of modern, atonal music. "I like harmony," he says. "Sometimes I think I was born at the wrong time...
With his flowing auburn hair and a predilection for wearing black, Samuragoch fashions himself as an outsider in Japan, where conformity rules. The country is now getting better at assimilating people with physical disabilities like deafness into mainstream society. But Samuragoch struggled in obscurity for many years. Instead of composing music for TV dramas that he considered unwatchable, he supported himself by working part time as a video-store clerk and a street sweeper. He finally broke through with the chance to compose the score for a TV film, Cosmos, and then for a video game, Bio Hazard...
...quickened, real sentiment was never stirred. In those days, recalls composer Nobuo Uematsu, 42, "no one really paid attention to game music." Now, as video-game story lines and imagery grow complex enough to evoke deeper emotional responses, the music is evolving too. In Japan several composers, including Mamoru Samuragoch (Onimusha) and Yoko Shimomura (Legend of Mana), have won acclaim for writing big-screen-quality music for small-screen games. Uematsu, who composed the music for the popular Final Fantasy series (the games, not the movie), is also winning a substantial U.S. following - drawing raves from gaming magazines and teens...
...quickened, real sentiment was never stirred. In those days, recalls composer Nobuo Uematsu, 42, "no one really paid attention to game music." Now, as video-game story lines and imagery grow complex enough to evoke deeper emotional responses, the music is evolving too. In Japan several composers, including Mamoru Samuragoch (Onimusha) and Yoko Shimomura (Legend of Mana), have won acclaim for writing big-screen-quality music for small-screen games. Uematsu, who composed the music for the popular Final Fantasy series (the games, not the movie), is also winning a substantial U.S. following--drawing raves from gaming magazines and teens...
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