Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses

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Playing games with postmodernism: an investigation of Matthew Hindson's Nintendo Music (2005)

Crowe, Jessica Leah ( 2016)

Ludomusicology - broadly, the study of video game music - is a relatively young sub-discipline of musicological inquiry. It is yet to resolve fundamental questions of how to explore game music, how to draw from other disciplines, and how to successfully secure a place of its own within scholarly investigation. This thesis examines the extent to which Matthew Hindson accurately represents the aesthetics of 8-bit video game audio within Nintendo Music, his 2005 piece for clarinet and piano. It also investigates how the piece fits within Hindson’s postmodern compositional style: incorporating elements of pluralism, quotation and nostalgia, the breaking down of barriers between so-called high and low art, and ultimately how these “playful postmodernisms” return to the concerns of ludomusicology - revealing a distinct link between all with the concept of play.