Interview: Amy Turk Takes Video Game Music to the Next Level
While searching for video game soundtracks on YouTube, I found there were hundreds of covers by some amazing musicians. Amy Turk stands out as one of the most accomplished and unusual, transforming video game music with her harp to a higher art form.
As fans will know, the Nintendo game series Legend of Zelda has some of the most beautiful and intricate video game soundtracks ever made. This is largely due to the work of composer Koji Kondo, who was the first composer hired by Nintendo. His soundtrack for the 1985 game Super Mario Bros is one of the most memorable in video game history.
Taking on some of these compositions and adapting them for the harp is no easy task and could only be achieved by a seasoned pro. Amy is an extremely skilled player, having studied at the Royal Academy of Music and performed at the Royal Albert Hall. Her music transports you to a heavenly realm and her YouTube videos feature playful references to the video games that inspired them. A multi-instrumentalist, Amy even learned to play the ocarina as featured in the Zelda game Ocarina of Time. Following the release of her album, Song of Time, I caught up with Amy on Zelda, her musical influences and how she started out.
You knew you wanted to be a harpist at just six years old. What drew you to playing the harp? Are your family musical, and were they supportive?
I don’t remember a significant lightning moment when I saw one in a concert or on TV and thought, “that’s what I want to do,” but the thought itself about wanting to do it was kind of a lightning moment. It definitely surprised my parents! My mum played piano and we were always listening to music at home and in the car, so the desire to explore music in itself wasn’t surprising, but the instrument choice apparently came out of nowhere.
I was very lucky that my mum was very supportive of her children trying out anything they were curious about, and also that my older brother had already attended a course for pre-schoolers about the instruments of the orchestra at a local music centre, so I was enrolled on that course soon after expressing an interest in the harp. The trouble was the lady who ran the course was a harpist and so after the first session (where she introduced the harp!) the rest of it was kind of superfluous to me, as interesting as it was. That lady went on to be my teacher for the next 10 years, and here I am.
A lot of the music I enjoyed as a child featured the harp. Things like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I watched over and over for days at a time. Both have wonderful harp parts – I wouldn’t say they were prominent, but the more I return to them the more I notice how fantastic those harp parts are, and I wonder if the feeling of magic and mystery that they evoke seeped in.
From Tchaikovsky to Anthrax, you play music from a variety of genres including classical, rock, pop and video game soundtracks. Do you have a favourite genre to play, and to listen to?
I try to stay absolutely unbiased on genre because my philosophy is that I can enjoy anything if it resonates with me, and I don’t like the elitism and superiority that can sometimes seep into certain genres and subgenres. Keeping an open mind means you never know what you will discover and be delighted by next.
Just like anyone I have been through many different phases of musical taste, and I just like to see that as a journey without tying myself to anything too staunchly. That’s one of the main reasons that I have tackled so many different styles of music – I have an enthusiasm for a wide range of genres and I like to keep it that way. Conveniently, this also allows me to challenge the perception of the harp as a romantic classical instrument at the same time. I enjoyed playing that stuff when I was studying, but I wanted more. I wanted to apply the music I loved to the harp, rather than allowing the harp’s traditions to enforce a set of styles on me.
Some of your most popular videos are pieces from the Nintendo game series Legend of Zelda. What is your connection to these games and how have they inspired you over the years?
I have always loved playing games, since I had my first console aged 4 (it was a Sega Mega Drive, and my first game was Sonic 3!). I came to the Zelda franchise quite late in the end, but by chance we had become a Nintendo household since my mum got us an N64 one Christmas, and then a GameCube a few years after that.
My best friend bought me a preowned copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker on Ebay, just on a whim thinking that I might enjoy it, and so in 2005 I started playing it and was utterly blown away. I always feel grateful in hindsight that I started with The Windwaker as I know there was a lot of backlash initially about the art style, and I missed out on all of that so it was a wonderfully innocent and isolated experience for me. I mentioned to a friend at school that I was playing it and they were shocked I hadn’t played Ocarina of Time, and offered to lend me a copy to play, which I did the following year.
From there I was a full-blown Zelda nut, and I haven’t really let up on that since. It’s just such a rich world with incredible music, compelling characters, great symbolism and spirituality. The way that music forms such an integral role in gameplay and storytelling in both The Windwaker and Ocarina of Time was a particularly important point for me.
I scoured the Internet for Ocarina of Time replicas, desperate to get my own to play, which is what eventually led me to Spencer Ocarinas. In 2006 Spencer was selling his ocarinas via Ebay auctions so it wasn’t exactly easy to find – not like today where OoT replicas are everywhere! I made a mini Ocarina of Time album with that Ocarina in my living room in 2007 as I was already transcribing music from the game by that time. I guess it was some of the first game music that spoke to me on such a deep level that I just wanted to play it for myself, to experience it that way as well as just listening to it. I wanted to live in it! What’s wonderful about YouTube is that I’ve gotten to do that a bunch of times now, and it’s allowing me to make connections with people all over the world, sharing a love of this music. I am very fortunate to be able to channel my love of it that way.
You’ve made music videos in some amazing locations, playing your harp to horses on a farm and inside a beautiful church. How did you choose those locations, and how did the horses respond to the music?!
It goes without saying that location shoots are always about setting an appropriate backdrop for the music, whether that’s a church, a castle, a swimming pool or a field. Generally we try to go for a location that we can add a few props to as a nod to the story of whichever universe the music takes place in. I make my videos on a very small budget so if we are able to go to a location to film, it is usually because I have called in a favour from a friend, or we carefully select somewhere that doesn’t charge too much for hire. I’ve been really lucky on lots of occasions to be able to film in the locations I have done, and it’s really because of the generosity of the people who own or manage those locations.
In the instance of the Breath of the Wild Riding music videos, the horse who features in the Night theme actually belongs to an old school friend of mine, so that was the starting point, just to contact her and see how possible it was to visit the stables and assess whether the access would work for the harp, and so on. The organisation that runs the stables there is actually a charity that supports horse riding for rehabilitation and learning disabilities, so in the end I got to promote that cause as well which was an amazing bonus. Aero the Horse was pretty much unphased by the sound of the harp – it was actually just before lunchtime when we filmed that track so the horses were all banging on the doors demanding their food! And I think they were a lot more interested in that really.
You have completed an MA degree at the Royal Academy of Music, performed at the Royal Albert Hall and mastered some incredibly complex classical compositions. What would you say has been the biggest challenge of your musical career to date?
In terms of my career after graduating from RAM, my most challenging video was Rey’s Theme from Star Wars: Episode VII. Trying to create an orchestral reduction for Harp Duo encompassing the amazing work of John Williams, with no access to an original score (which meant transcribing by ear), was incredibly hard, and then learning to play it and memorise it for the recording was the most technically demanding work I had done since I’d worked on Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. On top of that I had to plan and make (with some help from my mum!) a Rey costume and practise doing my hair like Rey so that I could do it quickly before the video shoot, and I wanted to borrow a student’s harp so that we had a black and a brown harp of the same model to show a light side/dark side in all the split shots. So that would still probably hold up as the most challenging video I have conceived and made from scratch after Toccata, and in terms of scene setting in addition to the musical challenges, it was actually even more of an undertaking.
In terms of the biggest challenge of my musical career, I’d say that’s still ongoing. I grew up in a classical world where my career path was either soloist, orchestral player, or background music, and none of that really seemed like what I wanted, as much as I tried to fit in! For me the biggest challenge is trying to step out of that classical upbringing, taking with me what’s useful and shedding what isn’t, and learning to work the way that other musicians I admire from more modern traditions work – valuing and embracing technology as an aid for self-expression, valuing and embracing as many musical influences as you like, not being concerned with what is proper, but just continually allowing yourself to be curious about what you could create and how you could achieve that.
I’m not dissing classical music by saying this – I learned so much in all my years playing it, and studying technique and interpretation – it’s just that there are so many skills nowadays like recording/mixing yourself, video editing and so on that are built into the culture of music making right now, and my training didn’t prepare me for that, nor did the expectations of my teachers or peers. I still have a lot to learn! But it’s a journey.
Many live music events have been postponed or cancelled this year due to COVID-19. As a live music artist, how has the outbreak impacted your 2020 plans?
The unexpected result of Covid-19 for me is that I have a lot more time to play and make videos. I have still been taking bookings for weddings in the UK in order to pay my bills up until recently. With all my clients for 2020 postponing or cancelling, there is nothing to do but make plans for playing at home, which is something I actually wanted for myself anyway.
In the last five years I worked very hard building up my channel, starting a Patreon page and trying to build more of a following on Spotify, but I did that whilst also teaching several days a week and playing at weddings every weekend, which for a long time was the only way I could secure a stable income. The summers particularly were very intense, trying to make time to plan videos around practising requests for wedding ceremonies and preparing lessons for students. I dreamed that one day I might be able to sustain myself from my work online, and I had been feeling a lot more hopeful about that outlook at the start of this year, but was afraid to take the plunge of finally saying, I’m not taking on any more weddings.
So as much as I would never have wished this global pandemic on anyone, it has given me a chance to test the lifestyle I thought I wanted, working primarily at home on playing, recording, and filming things by myself, and now I know that, as long as I keep working hard, it’s likely that I can sustain that financially. And that’s a relief.
I’d still love to get back to performing live once larger gatherings are safe again, but this is something I honestly haven’t done very much of (outside of weddings) in about ten years. It will probably sound ridiculous to anyone reading this, but for my own personal reasons, I am actually quite shy about it. Anyway, that’s a challenge to work up to at a later date, once it’s safe to go out! And in the meantime, I’m enjoying making music at home, and I know how fortunate I am to be able to continue doing that, especially in the current situation.
What can we look forward to next? Can you talk about any current or upcoming projects?
I have just released Song of Time, my Ocarina of Time cover album, which features 25 tracks from the game arranged for harps, ocarina, percussion and voice, all performed by me – that’s available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and the rest digitally and I may also do a vinyl run if there’s enough demand.
This summer I’ve also been working on some harp parts for a brilliant debut album by guitarist Benjamin Ellis (Scar Symmetry), which we just tracked last month. I am very excited about this project as metal has been a really important part of my musical journey and Ben’s writing and playing is just extraordinary.
Now that Song of Time is out I will be focusing on collaborations and writing original material going forward, starting with an EP of songs for solo harp featuring my percussive style. I do still intend to put out regular videos, and I imagine that some of those will still be covers (I have played a few more games with lovely music recently that I might like to tackle, for example!), but the focus now while I have time is going to be on composition, and we’ll see where that takes me! I hope it’s somewhere fun and that I’ll make some new friends on the way.
About the Artist: Amy Turk is a classically trained harpist, arranger, composer and session artist from the UK with special interests in percussion, video games, film scores and popular music of all styles.
