Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Eimear answers her call of duty
Galway composer’s video music night
Something a little different this week from us but no less essential obviously – not when one of the world’s most notable composers is coming to town this weekend.
Eimear Noone is a prodigious musician, composer and conductor from Galway who has become one of the world’s foremost composers of video game and film music.
Eimear has ridden her talent all the way to the Ivor Novellos and even the Oscars, where in 2020 she made history as the first female conductor ever to perform at the Academy Awards.
Along the way, through writing for games like the hugely successful World of Warcraft series and other best-sellers, as well as feature films including the 2020 animated film Two By Two: Overboard! – for which she was nominated for Best Score at the Ivor Novello Awards – her music has reached countless millions of people worldwide.
Eimear is also a prolific interpreter of other people’s music, and she is coming to Belfast tomorrow, Saturday 23, to conduct the Ulster Orchestra in an evening of video game music at the beautiful Grand Opera House, as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival.
“I’m so excited to meet the Ulster Orchestra, we’ve never worked together before,” she says.
“I’m really excited to be in Belfast, and it’ll be my first time at the Opera House.
“All my northern friends are coming, and my friends from college who are from Belfast – their parents are coming. It’s going to be ridiculous!”
The show, entitled Electric Arcade, is designed to be a celebration of video game music, from the 8-bit synthesisers of early games like Tetris to the grand symphonies of modern franchises like Halo.
“For me, it’s important to have the classics in there, and reinterpret them from their 8-bit origins to the present moment,” says Eimear.
“It’s a mix of everything, and that’s what’s interesting about video game music. It’s quite an emotional roller coaster – we designed it that way on purpose – but it also goes through
I look at video game music as pop art, the way you’d look at Andy Warhol as pop art, and it has its place.
from the 80s to the present day. It’s really, really fun, and it doesn’t dumb down anything.”
The uninitiated may raise their eyebrows at a classically trained composer, who has conducted orchestras worldwide, performing the work of Stravinsky, Dvorak and Rimsky-korsakov, devoting so much of her musical life to video game music.
But for one thing, Eimear has a genuine passion for the music and the fans – who she says treat the musicians “like the Rolling Stones” – and she has no time for musical snobbery.
“I don’t believe in snobbery, I think that’s very limiting,” she says. “I feel like music is like a massive treasure chest, and I’m really excited about sharing [Stravinsky’s] The Rite of Spring with gamers, which I have done in concert, or sharing game music with fans of opera. For me, genre is of little consequence.
“I look at video game music as pop art, the way you’d look at Andy Warhol as pop art, and it has its place. Some of it will survive, most of it won’t, but that’s the same as every genre throughout music history.”
Tomorrow evening will be spectacular!