Hammel, Jennifer Miller

Arcade, a new project by Classical California, aims to dispel preconceptions about classical music and video game soundtracks.A treacherous puzzle that lies near the end of Myst, the 1993 point-and-click video game, involves a pipe organ and a spaceship.But Jennifer Miller Hammel, a pianist who got the game as a child for Christmas that year, did not have much trouble finding the solution. The experience even showed her that video games could deeply incorporate music.Hammel, 44, is now a trained opera singer and a host at Classical California, a classical musical radio network that is a collaboration between KUSC in Los Angeles and KDFC in San Francisco. But she still loves video games, gravitating toward action-adventure and role-playing series like Fallout and Mass Effect. After nearly 150 hours of space exploration, she recently completed Starfield.The musical themes to Fallout 3 or Skyrim would occasionally be played at Classical California, Hammel said. But whenever she pitched an hourly show or a podcast that would dig deeper into video game music, she was told that the genre was polarizing. More