Review: The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers

Video game music finally receives the “Cambridge” treatment with The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, a far-reaching volume of twenty-four chapters spanning a commendable breadth of topics and approaches. While we have moved beyond the need for legitimizing the field (for the most part), such a volume certainly marks a milestone; alongside this very journal, the Cambridge Companion provides a central resource for scholars, students, and enthusiasts to get an overall sense of the field, its areas of interest, its subjects of study, and its organizing principles. It is on that note that I do not use the term “commendable” lightly, as editors Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers have collected an impressive array of authors to provide many different sorts of insights into video game music. Indeed, these perspectives go beyond scholarly “ludomusicology” to include practitioner and industry perspectives that bolster this volume’s applicability and usefulness as a reference...