Jeff van Dyck has made a name for himself as an expert scoring war strategy games through the Total War franchise. However, his strongest published work for the genre is actually Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a spinoff of the Caesar city-building series set in ancient China.
Body
As always, van Dyck dives into the musical culture of the location and time that the game is set in – for Emperor, he chooses to mainly work with chamber music-sized orchestrations that pair various Chinese solo instruments with different percussive backgrounds. The result is a lush, intoxicating listen.
“Sunset Ceremony” and “Buddha’s Dream” remain impressive throughout their long playtimes, carried by strong melodic writing and an unerring sense of how to make the most of its ensemble’s alluring tone colours. At other times, the soundtrack ventures into the realm of the mystical with the help of Western orchestral stylings and electronic manipulation.
Usually reflective in nature, Emperor‘s lyrical pieces balance their exotic appeal with a sense of austerity emanating from the ceremonial percussion rhythms that occasionally turn ritualistic, for example, on “Himalayan Echoes” and “Attack of the Feng Luo”. The entire soundtrack is sensitively-written and beautifully-implemented.
Summary
The Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom soundtrack is the most successful appropriation of traditional Chinese music by a Western game score. The soundtrack CD, included in the game’s limited edition in certain regions, is not widely available. Van Dyck nevertheless provides MP3 downloads of the soundtrack’s pieces through his official website.
