Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
I disagree with your comment on it just being background music. Personally, I find as much value in the tracks by themselves much of the time as I do in listening to them in the scenes they accompany. Yes these themes often have to be repeated often, and loop endlessly, but I think it's rather elitest to claim that that somehow makes them inferior. Many themes done by Uematsu, Jeremy Soule, and other video game composers can convey as much emotion and feeling, and stand on their own as well as any "traditional" composition.

Frankly, to say that one is superior to the other is just plain ignorant. It's music, and more importantly, music created for a different purpose than what the likes of Mozart or Beethoven did. You can't say Uematsu and the like aren't as good, when they obviously create great music. Music is subjective, and more importantly, you do a disservice to people like these who sometimes literally compose more than 100 songs per game, of greater variation in style and feel than most people could manage.
I don't think I said Mozart or Beethoven was superior, did I? If I did, I certainly didn't mean to. I'm a big fan of Uematsu's work, but the point I was making was to that to the casual music lover, who may not have necessarily heard of Uematsu but would have heard of Mozart, they're probably more likely to pay money to listen to Mozart than Uematsu. I'm a huge fan of the work of Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda and I don't consider it inferior in the slightest. I was doing no disservice to them at all, I was merely stating that in my opinion they have limited appeal and are unlikely to be performed as regularly as more famous composers in the West.

Just because I tend to listen to their music in the background is no insult to it either. The fact that I listen to their music as regularly as I do is a tribute to how much I like their music and whether I listen to it in the background or not doesn't mean it's emotionless. When I say they don't compare, I was on about the audience for classical music vs. the audience for computer game music. I said I'd be more likely to pay to listen to some Holst partly because something like The Planets is much shorter than an entire soundtrack and I think is a rather well rounded suite, whereas I might be disappointed certain tracks were left out of a Final Fantasy performance.