Music of The Final Fantasy Series - Public Performances

Public Performances

Music from Final Fantasy has been performed numerous times in concert tours and other live performances. Music from the series was played in the first four concerts of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra's Orchestral Game Music Concerts series from 1991 to 1994, and each concert has been released on an album. It has also been played in the Video Games Live concert tour from 2005 to date as well as the Play! A Video Game Symphony world tour from 2006 onwards, for which Nobuo Uematsu composed the opening fanfare that accompanies each performance. Final Fantasy music was played at the Symphonic Game Music Concert series, a series of annual German video game music concerts notable for being the first of their kind outside of Japan, from 2003 to 2007. The music made up one fourth of the Symphonic Fantasies concerts in September 2009 which were produced by the creators of the Symphonic Game Music Concert series. It has also been played by the Australian Eminence Symphony Orchestra, an independent symphony orchestra specializing in classical music from video games.

Music from the series has also been played in specific Final Fantasy concerts and concert series. After the success of the 20020220 Music from Final Fantasy concert in 2002, a recording of which was produced as an album, the Tour de Japon: Music from Final Fantasy was launched in Japan in 2004. It was followed by the Dear Friends -Music from Final Fantasy- tour in the United States that same year, which was originally scheduled to be a single concert but grew into a year-long tour. In 2005, a concert entitled More Friends: Music from Final Fantasy was performed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the first Dear Friends concert and also had an album published of the performance. The latest Final Fantasy tour is the worldwide Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy tour, which began in Sweden in 2007 and still continues to date. A recording of its first performance was released as an album. Nobuo Uematsu additionally plays with The Black Mages, a band which performs Final Fantasy music in a rock music style. They have performed music live in concert, as well as with orchestras as part of various concert tours. They have released three albums to date, as well as DVDs of their live performances.

From November 2003 to April 2004, Square Enix U.S.A. launched an AOL Radio station dedicated to music from the series, initially carrying complete tracks from Final Fantasy XI in addition to samplings from VII through X. The station was relaunched in July 2006 and still remains on the site. In the 2004 Summer Olympics, the American synchronized swimming duo consisting of Alison Bartosik and Anna Kozlova were awarded the bronze medal for their performance to the song "Liberi Fatali" from Final Fantasy VIII.