Video Game Musicology in Practice

Abstract

Within the context of the development over the past decades of a new musicology that shifts the focus away from the autonomous work of art, Tim Summers proposes fifteen “awkward questions” for video game music scholars within the new field. Summers poses the questions rhetorically as a means for self-reflection. The questions are presented in seven thematic sections: sources for studying game music, value and canon, issues connected with linear histories, analytical approaches, conceptualizations of the listener/the player, culture and context, and, finally, audiences and education. He highlights several questions and challenges of methodology within the new musicology that must be grappled with by video game music scholars.