Videogame concerts have become de rigueur in recent years. We’ve seen the Elden Ring Symphonic Adventure, the FFVII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, and now Sony is getting in on the action with PlayStation: The Concert. Often held in arena-style venues, these performances are an exercise in self-indulgent commercialism, replete with large projection screens and official merchandise to wave while you watch. Even HoYoverse has enjoyed success with the Genshin Impact Concert Tour in recent years.
Its latest endeavor, Impact4Music: Diversity in Harmony, stands apart as an elevated, high-art performance. This benefit concert – the second in the Impact4Music project’s lifetime – brings me to a second-row seat in the Golden Hall of the Wiener Musikverein, primed for an evening spent with the Vienna University Philharmonic. “I prefer to think of this as more of a musical party, rather than a concert,” conductor Vijay Upadhyaya divulges as he takes to the stage.
Surrounded by over 150 years of history and culture, it’s hard to reconcile that the same hall that premiered Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is now host to videogame music. Nonetheless, Upadhyaya believes that videogames are a vital tool to push that culture forward. “We are at the brink of something with videogames and film music,” Upadhyaya tells me in a white-walled annex of the Musikverein earlier in the day. “It’s a new art form. We can go back to Mozart, but what are we producing today that’s equivalent to that standard? We have to have something new.”
This is far from a new revelation for Upadhyaya, who touches upon his decade spent at the European Union developing workshops for “audience development, audience building, digitization, and connection to commerce” to help artists prepare for the current arts crisis. “I’ve been thinking for the past 15 years how to shift away from the classical thing and move in directions where it survives.”
Survival, it seems, might well lie in demystification, and so this “musical party” kicks off with a rendition of ‘Genshin Impact Main Theme.’ In this hall of burnished gold and crystal chandeliers, this short composition steps beyond the confines of Genshin Impact’s login menu and ascends to greater heights. As the orchestra rises to meet the harp-and-flute duet which carries its all too familiar dreamy opening notes, it brings with it a reminder. The next minute-and-a-half represents a legion of fans, thousands of jobs – and now, thanks to programs like Impact4Music, an untold number of marginalized beneficiaries.
There’s no question that music is of paramount importance to HoYoverse. Its in-house music studio, HoYo-MiX, has been an active part of IP development since its inception in 2014. Today, it enjoys two million monthly listeners on Spotify. After the concert, I tell Wenyi Jin, the president of global publishing and operations at HoYoverse, of the fanbase’s in-joke that HoYoverse is a music company that makes games to promote their music, rather than the other way around. “We feel honored by the joke,” she replies. “Music is celebrated by every human culture. It can evoke both visual imagery and emotions regardless of what languages we speak. That is why we make music production a big part of our game development.”
After a comfortable segue into ‘Scorching Outpost’ and ‘Village Surrounded by Green,’ it’s apparent that this programme is not a collection of HoYo-MiX’s greatest hits, but the ones most in service to this concert’s subtitle: ‘Diversity in Harmony.’ Kicking off a Genshin Impact benefit concert with the Dar al-Islam-inspired reaches of Sumeru feels like a statement on HoYoverse’s part. This ability to deliver world music on a world stage is only possible thanks to its source material; in the Golden Hall, it’s a point of pride.
I broach Genshin Impact’s cultural diversity with Jin. “We want to create a completely fictional fantasy world through Genshin Impact, not a realistic one,” she amends. In her assessment, these cultural throughlines are “references” that only offer “hints of, or similarity to, the real world.” Instead, “all real-world references and inspirations are deconstructed and recreated instead of simply being adjusted and adapted.” I understand the sentiment – Genshin Impact is not our world, nor should it be – but Jin’s clarification rings as hollow boilerplate in the face of what is, undeniably, world music. In Upadhyaya’s words, “It doesn’t insinuate. It directly deals with the culture.”
From Alokesh Chandra on sitar to Christa Schönfeldinger on glass harmonica, the diversity on the Golden Hall’s stage is unmistakable. It reaches a crescendo during ‘Natlan Main Theme,’ when the Vienna University Philharmonic employs its 200-strong choir to deliver its powerful Swahili chorus. Steven Ralph’s baritone fills this historically white space like it was made for him, lending his performance an earned grandiosity. While all the traditional elements of a European orchestra remain irreplaceable in each composition, they are also the scaffolding that uplifts the soloists in each piece. Each folk instrument takes center stage both figuratively and literally, regardless of which region the night’s programme takes us. Upadhyaya likens it to the Silk Road, as we pass through China and Hungary, Iran, Turkey, India, and beyond.
“This videogame connects that again,” he exclaims. “In times like this, what should we say about Gaza and what should we say about Ukraine? I can’t say anything. I have no solution in my head for it. But we can build some bridges through that. We have Russians and Ukrainians playing together and they say: ‘let us focus on the culture and what we’re doing in the project.’” This Silk Road is not one of commerce, but of culture – and in Upadhyaya’s estimation, it still has miles to go. “I think there’s a big scope for this in the UK,” he says. “It has all these communities in a much bigger way than here in Vienna, or Paris.”
So then, why Vienna? Aside from its reputation as the capital of classical music, the answer to this question eludes me until we reach the Mondstadt segment of the programme. Whether you’ve played since day one or only joined last week, Mondstadt’s Bavarian streets and Rhineland-Palatinate hills are your introduction to Teyvat. It strikes me that Genshin Impact’s heritage lies in Germanic culture as much as it does its Chinese development team. This performance, then, is Genshin Impact coming home.
It’s also another instance of HoYoverse’s penchant for never doing anything by halves. The Golden Hall’s acoustics aren’t just good; they are physiological. “They’ve tried to copy it many times but they could never do it,” Upadhyaya laughs. The vibrations ringing through its shoebox-style proportions reverberate through the soles of your feet, crawl into your chest, and leap up into your throat. It’s enough to raise goosebumps on the greatest skeptic in the time-worn ‘games as art’ debate. We are explicitly told to withhold our applause until the end of each segment, and the synaesthetic tension is palpable. Occasionally, a clap breaks the silence, as audience members seek a mechanical release.
You might expect this audience to consist of the most die-hard gacha game fans: the unflattering archetypes of sun-deprived, sweaty young men or hyperactive, squealing cosplayers. This assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Elderly concertgoers sit shoulder to shoulder with clean-shaven salarymen and students in casual dress. The handful of cosplayers that take up the front row represent a photo opp rather than a sideshow. For Upadhyaya, this concert’s potential “to bring in a lot of young people into the audience who had never been in a hall like this before” is its own success story. It’s also an opportunity for classical music to capture a new target audience amid global economic crises.
“Music and art is going to have more of a social impact, rather than a musical impact in the future,” he predicts. “Playing the classical repertoire is not going to foster many jobs in the future. But this fosters jobs, to a certain extent.”
Upadhyaya believes this sudden appetite for live videogame music stems from its function as a sensory trigger, particularly for older generations who played videogames in their youth. He compares it to Bollywood’s influence on his own childhood, but even film cannot reach videogames “because you don’t watch the film and hear that music a hundred times. But if you’re playing a game for twenty hours, you hear it again and again.”
I experience this prick to my subconscious during the evening’s rendition of ‘Gallant Challenge.’ Liyue’s battle theme is no longer a background accompaniment thanks to stirring performances by Yü Gong, Lin Jiajin, and Veronika Vitazkova on the Guzheng, Pipa, and Dizi. Instead, these traditional Chinese folk instruments transport me to Liyue’s in-game debut back in March 2020 and memories of the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, a world away from Teyvat, Vienna, and China.
Upadhyaya himself is the antithesis of the stereotypical conductor: clean-shaven; rakish; brown – a beacon of charisma for the audience and the orchestra. To a certain extent, the title ‘conductor’ does him a disservice. This evening, he is conductor, host, and all-around hypeman to the small army of talented musicians that cluster around his podium. He prompts them to stand and bask in the applause they receive, and defuses any hiccups with light humor and grace. “The hall looks like a train in India,” he quips as musicians awkwardly shuffle on and off the Golden Hall’s wooden stage. Later, the Director-General of the United Nations Office in Vienna, Ghada Waly, takes to the stage to deliver a speech that pays tribute to music’s ability to dismantle language barriers. “Vijay Upadhyaya embodies this ideal,” Waly affirms.
However, Waly isn’t just here to deliver commendations. She also outlines the tangible change this benefit concert is set to bring about. Supported charities include the UNODC Youth Initiative, Superar, Keep Your Smile, Cool Earth, and the Vienna University Philharmonic itself. Later, Wenyi explained to me how the revenue is apportioned. “The majority of ticket revenue will go to the performers and orchestras because we hope that more non-profit orchestras can deliver more high-quality performances to a broader audience,” she says. “At the same time, the orchestras we support may also choose to share revenue with other organizations that help make the concert happen.”
As diverse and charitable as the Musikveiren’s stage is this evening, a shadow looms over each performance. In August, accusations were levied at HoYoverse concerning a lack of representation following the Natlan region’s debut. A Change.org petition to “stop cultural appropriation and whitewashing in MiHoYo games” has garnered over 120,000 signatures, and several Genshin Impact voice actors have joined the rallying cry for greater inclusivity. I ask Wenyi Jin whether HoYoverse plans to address these concerns, but she does not respond.
She does, however, direct me to other initiatives under the Genshin4Good umbrella which launched this year. This includes a partnership with the Discovery Channel to “raise awareness for protecting a variety of fragile natural habitats” with “donated revenue from special merch sales to Cool Earth for rainforest conservation.” HoYoverse also collaborated with Singapore’s S.E.A Aquarium to “combine features from Genshin Impact’s underwater area of Fontaine with real-world marine wonders, encouraging visitors to explore marine biodiversity and learn about marine conservation.”
In light of this controversy, Impact4Music’s bid for a benefit concert advocating for “Diversity in Harmony” presents an intriguing moral quandary. Does an Indigenous person care about Genshin Impact’s poor representation when they secure funding to save the rainforest on which their lives depend? Does a musically inclined child from a poor financial background care when granted access to free music education for an instrument they love? The answer may be obvious, but it’s also fraught. When characters of color are often subject to low banner sales, it might suggest HoYoverse is willing to sacrifice in-game representation to maximize its profit margins and perform greater social advocacy. In a perfect world, the two should co-exist; perhaps that perfection is beyond the boundless optimism of the HoYoverse.
Against the backdrop of HoYoverse’s staggering financial success, it’s clear it could still be doing more. While the individuals helping this project come to fruition have world-changing ambitions, Impact4Music is a comparatively small, niche project, easily put out of sight and out of mind. Upadhyaya agrees. “This company needs a clear self-confidence that it is creating new art,” he says, in the white-walled annex full of promise. “It is like a sideline.” Wenyi promises that such initiatives will continue into 2025, and one would hope they’ll become a more prominent part of the brand. In Upadhyaya’s estimation, the challenge for a large company like HoYoverse is to have all its structures “woven into one thought” – but he maintains “no department does not see the advantages of doing something like this.”
Our evening in Teyvat draws to a close with an encore of ‘Genshin Impact Main Theme,’ and we step out en masse into the brisk night of the Innere Stadt. To the outside eye, we could have spent the past two hours listening to Vivaldi or Strauss. Audience members linger in the plaza, not quite ready to disperse from the Musikverein’s Grecian façade. For many, this will have been their first classical concert; thanks to Impact4Music and Vijay Upadhyaya, odds are it won’t be their last.
