| Jeremy Soule | |
|---|---|
Jeremy Soule, December 2010 |
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| Background information | |
| Born | December 19, 1975 Keokuk, Iowa |
| Genres | Orchestral, New Age, classical |
| Occupations | Composer, symphonist |
| Years active | 1994–present |
| Labels | DirectSong |
Jeremy Soule ( /ˈsoʊl/;[1] born December 19, 1975[2] in Keokuk, Iowa) is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television and video games. He has won multiple awards and has been described as the "John Williams of video game music" and "a model of success" for Western composers.[3][4] He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career. He is best known for his work in The Elder Scrolls series, the Guild Wars series, and several other top-selling titles such as Total Annihilation, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege and Harry Potter.
After earning the equivalent of a Master's degree in composition before completing high school, he became an employee of Square in 1994. After composing the soundtrack to Secret of Evermore, he left to join Humongous Entertainment, where he composed several children's games as well as Total Annihilation, his first award-winning score. He left to form his own music production company, Soule Media in 2000, now called Artistry Entertainment. Through the company Soule has created several award-winning soundtracks, including Icewind Dale, the Harry Potter series of games, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and most recently The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
In 2005 he founded DirectSong, a record label that publishes digital DRM-free versions of his soundtracks as well as those of classical composers. Soule's works have been played in several live concerts such as the Symphonic Game Music Concert in Germany and the international Play! A Video Game Symphony concert series. While many of his works are orchestral, he considers himself a "music practitioner", or someone who creates music in general rather than just one type of music.[4] Several of Soule's soundtracks have been created both credited and uncredited with the help of his brother Julian Soule, who works for Artistry Entertainment. His favorite type of game to compose for is ambitious games by people with new ideas, rather than any specific genre.
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Jeremy Soule, born in Keokuk, Iowa to a public school music teacher father and a graphic designer mother, became interested in music and symphony orchestras at the age of five.[5][6][7] Soule began taking piano lessons at an early age and became entranced with music, even writing music notation in the margins of his math homework; after his teachers and his father realized his talent, he began taking private lessons with professors from Western Illinois University when he was in sixth grade.[8][9] He ended up earning the equivalent of a Master's Degree in composition before completing high school, though, as he never enrolled in the school, he did not technically earn a degree.[8] He was split between trying to become a concert pianist and a composer when he grew up; he ended up deciding to become a composer once he realized that he could not do both.[6]
While playing video games as a child, Soule came to believe that the experience they created could be greatly enhanced by having a better musical score.[6] After completing high school, he took a year to create a portfolio showcasing what he felt video game scores should sound like. Soule sent the tape to LucasArts and Square. Square very much appreciated the portfolio; he does not believe that LucasArts ever listened to his tapes as they had a "no unsolicited package" policy.[8] Soule began working at Square in Seattle only two weeks after first submitting his demo tapes.[6]
Soule was promptly given the task by Square to score Secret of Evermore. The finished game features an untraditional score incorporating ambient background sounds (like wind blowing and ocean waves) into the music and utilizing a more mellow orchestral sound.[8] Part of the reason for this was that the sound program used in Evermore was not up to the technical challenge of what Soule wanted to do with it, forcing him to work creatively within his limitations.[3] When Ron Gilbert of LucasArts left to form his own company, Humongous Entertainment, and Square moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, Soule quit Square to score Gilbert's children's adventure game series, Putt-Putt; he was the company's third employee.[10] Soule composed the soundtracks to 11 children's games over the next three years, with multiple titles in the Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish and Spy Fox series.[5]
While working at Humongous, Soule met fellow employee and video game designer Chris Taylor, and signed on to compose the soundtrack to his major project, Total Annihilation. Soule convinced Taylor that, given the large amount of other real-time strategy games coming out at the same time as Total Annihilation with techno scores, that to separate themselves they needed to do a large orchestral score. He went so far as to bet a year's worth of reduced pay that it would pay off; Gilbert felt that it did after the first sentence of the first review of the game he read was about the music.[3][8] Given the software limitations at the time, to make the sound work correctly required a full live orchestra, the first that Soule had ever worked with; the orchestral tracks in Evermore had been performed by Soule and his brother by themselves, two instruments at a time.[3] The soundtrack earned Soule his first award, that of "Best Music" of 1997 from GameSpot in their year-end awards.[11] Soule spent the next two years composing music for the game's two expansion packs and for children's games.[5]
In February 2000, Jeremy and his brother, Julian, formed Soule Media as an independent music production company; its name has since been changed to Artistry Entertainment.[12] Julian works as a sound engineer and composer for the company, and has assisted Jeremy in several projects throughout his career, both credited and uncredited.[3][6] The first large project that Jeremy Soule worked on through the company was 2000's Icewind Dale, which won the best music of the year award from both IGN and GameSpot.[13][14]
In 2001 Soule scored the first of five Harry Potter games that he would work on between then and 2005. His first game, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was nominated for a Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award for "Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition", while Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban won and were nominated, respectively, for a British Academy of Film & Television Arts award for "Best Score" in the Game Music Category.[15][16][17] The other games he composed for that year include Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Azurik: Rise of Perathia, which he later described as a bad game lifted up in the eyes of testers and reviewers by good music.[18] He was responsible for composing the soundtracks to three top-selling role-playing games in 2002, those of Dungeon Siege, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights; Morrowind earned him his second Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award nomination.[19]
Since then Artistry Entertainment has grown and scored a string of highly successful games such as the Guild Wars series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.[5] Oblivion was an award-winning soundtrack by Soule. It was nominated for the 2006 British Academy of Film & Television Arts and Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awards, and won the MTV Video Music Awards and Official Xbox Magazine soundtrack awards.[20][21][22][23] In 2005 Jeremy and Julian Soule founded DirectSong, a company which sells DRM-free downloads of Jeremy's compositions as well as works by dozens of classical composers. By 2007 the company had grown to over one million registered customers, though Soule noted that not all of those customers resulted in a sale of a non-free product.[3] Soule also uses the company to sell "expansion packs" of music for games such as Guild Wars that can be played in game like the rest of the soundtrack; he estimates that at least 10% of the players of Guild Wars have bought an expansion pack of music from DirectSong. Soule says that the traffic numbers for DirectSong have surpassed some major record labels at times.[18] Since 2005 he has worked on several more games, including Prey, Company of Heroes, and Supreme Commander; the last was another real-time strategy game with Chris Taylor.[5]
Music that Soule has composed has been played in numerous live concerts. His music from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was performed on August 20, 2003 at the first Symphonic Game Music Concert in Leipzig, Germany, and his music from Morrowind was performed at the third Symphonic Game Music Concert on August 17, 2005.[24] Selections of his pieces from Morrowind and Oblivion are played in the international concert series Play! A Video Game Symphony. Jeremy Soule attended the world-premiere of Play! on May 27, 2006 in Chicago.[25] Music from Oblivion has also been played at the Press Start 2007 -Symphony of Games- concerts in September 2007 in Japan.[26] Soule's music has been featured in numerous top-selling games; he once estimated in an interview that around 10 million games with his music in them were sold in 2006 alone.[1]
Selections of remixes of Soule's work appear on English remixing websites such as OverClocked ReMix.[27] Soule is a supporter of the game music arrangement community, even going so far as to submit his own arrangement to OverClocked ReMix. He did so to help promote and inspire younger and newer composers. The track, "Squaresoft Variation", arranges the Final Fantasy VI piece "Terra"; Soule has said that he chose the piece to remix because when he first started at Square he spent some time debugging the game before his composition duties for Evermore started.[3][28]
Soule rarely, if ever, gets to see the game he is composing the soundtrack for in any sort of completed state before he begins work; as a result he bases many of his musical decisions on the company's previous games. He credits his success with this strategy to the fact that many of the games he works on come from studios that have created several successful games in the past.[8] He finds it much easier to compose a soundtrack to a game that is very visual in nature, such as a role-playing game.[6] He also likes to see the storyboards and concept art for the game, as he considers them a good provider of "pure emotional intent" for the game.[9] When composing a soundtrack, the first thing that he decides is the tempo and the amount of energy the music will have; this decision is as much based on the genre of the game as it is the artistic style of the game.[8] After that, Soule starts composing smaller tracks in the soundtrack, to make sure that they match up with the vision of the game before he starts on the major themes.[3] Soule tries to compose all of a game's soundtrack himself rather than in a team, though he sometimes collaborates with his brother.[9]
Although many of his works are orchestral in nature, Soule has denied that it is his "style", as he feels that the term boxes him in to only creating one type of music. He prefers to call himself a "music practitioner", or someone who creates music in general rather than just one type of music as he is capable of many styles, such as Japanese pop, which he has written along with Jeff Miyahara. Soule considers music to be like a language, which can be arranged in many different ways if you understand the structure.[4] He does not have a favorite genre of game to compose for, preferring instead to compose for "ambitious" games by people with "new ideas".[18]
Soule's greatest musical influences are "Debussy's exploration of harmony", "Wagner's grand operas", and "Mozart's form and composition".[6] While many of his orchestral works are based on movie scores in terms of scope, he does not often listen to movie scores, though he names his favorite composer as John Williams.[6][8] The influence has been noted by critics, who have termed Soule "the John Williams of video game music".[3] Among video game music influences, he has cited Square for providing him "with the education for what quality means to this business" and Nobuo Uematsu in particular.[4] His favorite style of music to listen to is British pop and rock music, while his favorite video games are the ones that he has written scores to, especially the ones made by Chris Taylor, though one of his all-time favorites is The Legend of Zelda. He has said that the games he would most like to work on that he has not already are ones by Shigeru Miyamoto, a Final Fantasy game, and a Metroid game.[8]
| Year | Award | Category | Work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1997 | GameSpot | Best Music[11] | Total Annihilation | Won |
| 2000 | IGN | Best Use of Sound[13] | Icewind Dale | Won |
| GameSpot | Best Music[14] | Icewind Dale | Won | |
| 2001 | Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences | Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition[15] | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone | Nominated |
| 2002 | Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences | Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition[19] | The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind | Nominated |
| 2003 | British Academy of Film & Television Arts | Best Score, Game Music Category[16] | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Won |
| 2004 | British Academy of Film & Television Arts | Best Score, Game Music Category[17] | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Nominated |
| 2006 | British Academy of Film & Television Arts | Best Score, Game Music Category[20] | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | Nominated |
| Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences | Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition[21] | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | Nominated | |
| MTV Video Music Awards | Best Video Game Score[22] | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | Won | |
| Official Xbox Magazine | Soundtrack of the Year[23] | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | Won |