Minecraft Made Me Finally Appreciate Classical Music
It’s fair to say that I didn’t exactly grow up “cultured.”
I grew up with very little concern for the arts, and this was common for my friends who grew up in a similar environment.
My two loves growing up were video games and action movies. Typical tastes for a suburban American boy at the time. Fine arts weren’t even something I could consider caring about. They weren’t interactive and typically didn’t feature explosions. How could I care about something so banal?
Towards the end of my junior year in high school, I was studying for a test. A friend had told me that they had listened to the Minecraft soundtrack while studying, and it had helped him to focus. Thus, on a whim, I decided to give it a shot.
It ended up having the opposite effect.
I sat at my desk, leaning against the back of my chair, flooded with memories and emotions from elementary school. I had not played the game in several years. It had gone out of fashion, and was yet to have the extreme, unprecedented popularity resurgence it had in 2019–2020. I felt like I was tapped into an artistic undercurrent privy to me and few others. It was amazing.
The simplicity of the music floored me. Primarily consisting of a recorded piano and synth plugins that come stock with the Ableton audio workstation software, I was amazed that music so simple could be so evocative. It reframed how I viewed music as a whole.
Since then I have explored and come to love the composers that influenced C418’s soundtrack for Minecraft. Notably, Claude Debussy and Eric Satie. So now when asked about where my musical inspiration came from, I no longer have to embarrassingly admit that it all goes back to Minecraft.
