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Coming up, Etomi How do your.

Super Mario jumps out of your Gameboy and into a local concert hall.

A refugee escapes bombs in Iraq and discover something very important at a Cleveland museum and a powerful quintet hits the gorgeous Mixon Hall stage in University Circle.

Hello and welcome to applause.

My friends.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia if you grew up playing video games, then you probably know the themes from Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

And it's not often you get to hear the music outside of the game itself, but now you can.

Thanks to the video game Symphony made up of passionate musicians who also happen to be big time gamers.

Was that good?

Okay, I'm going to play again.

For me playing video games.

There are so many factors that go into making a game memorable.

And one of the biggest factors for me is the music.

I grew up playing video games.

That was my my introduction to music actually really was through video games specifically Mario, Zelda, Halo, you name it all.

Pretty much everything that I could get my hands on.

And I was allowed to play.

Growing up, I was really into Skyrim and all those mid-twenties, early 2000 games that would come out and I just plug in so many hours in the background music and I thought it was so cool.

And so I've always wondered to myself as time went on, where is this music even being recorded?

Is it being recorded?

How do you even play it?

And I think what's so great about the video game music genre and video games is in general is that there is a lot of opportunity for you to be the hero of your own story.

And the music just really captures that spirit and conveys that to modern day audiences.

I've been playing video games since I was a kid.

I mean, I'm dressed as Aerith from Final Fantasy seven right now.

It's cool to hear a lot of the music that I both grew up playing and play now.

Hearing it through the orchestra is just absolutely beautiful.

It's a rare thing.

We're a bunch of music lovers that just absolutely adore this music.

We just want to give this music all the love and attention and respect that it deserves.

It is so beloved by so many people of a wide range of ages and genders, and it's really important to reach those people where they are and bring this music to them.

ETOMI How do your video game?

Symphony is a full symphony orchestra that is fully dedicated to playing video game music, and we at the Vgs believe that this is the classical music of the future and we kind of see in the classical world that it's underappreciated.

It's under played.

And so in that sense, you know, we want to do it justice, but it's also a celebration of how wonderful this music is.

We love sharing it with with other people and we just love performing it ourselves.

There are some orchestras that are hired by the video game companies like Nintendo, Square Enix, and they tour and they play music from certain video game series like Final Fantasy or Zelda, But there aren't a lot of grassroots orchestras that play this music and are dedicated to it.

So we're just thinking, why don't we have that here in Northeast Ohio?

Why don't we have that here in Ohio?

So we want to bring that to this area for our audience and also to our players to be able to perform this music that otherwise they might not be able to perform ever in their lives.

We have so many people come up to us and say, it's been my dream since I was a child to play this music.

And finally I'm able to utilize this as a tool to educate the public.

Oftentimes people will come up to me and be like, y y video game music, or, you know, as opposed to focusing all of your energy on classical orchestral music.

It's just as intricate and complex as any other classical piece, and it's connected to these fantastical worlds and emotions and it tends to pull from a lot of different cultures, two cultures and time periods that you wouldn't necessarily get to be exposed to otherwise.

It navigates extreme spectrums of emotion, and it's very accessible to the public.

So it's a great vessel to either reach the youth and even older folks too, that often come to me and say how much they enjoy the music, although they don't know anything about the video games.

I think what's so amazing about this group is that ability to separate the music from the video game and show it as it's completely unique, original art form within music.

And in that way the genre is different than maybe some other genres where it's completely dependent on its surroundings and you're able to separate it from that and you're going to have an amazing product at the end of the day that audiences are going to love.

We definitely slant towards certain genres.

Personally, I think the RPG and fantasy genre tends to have some of the most expansive and epic soundtracks just because of the nature of the drama.

We do a lot of that, but all Final Fantasy music is just great overall, but we have this arrangement of the opening and bombing mission, so there's just this really challenging piece and I love it.

It's super active, it's super exciting, has all these great brass moments.

It's you can't beat it.

I love it.

And we do a lot of Nintendo kind of for obvious reasons, because those are some of the best known and just kind of like some of the greatest tunes and soundtracks out there.

So a lot of Mario and Zelda and Pokémon, but we're starting to get into more genres as we go along.

I want to be the very best.

I don't want have a worst case than snapping test to train, but I will travel across what's exhilarating.

I it's so hard to describe each Pokémon since I get up here and I see the audience and I'm like, This is real.

These people came for us and that is just so beautiful.

We're bringing an entirely new audience into the classical music world, which is something that is so important to me.

I want people to come to see us and hear this wonderful music, and I want this to maybe be their first experience going to an orchestra ever.

And then maybe they'll go to more and more orchestras and support the arts in other ways.

the video game Symphony makes it Sometimes.

If I need a break while I'm writing, I'll go pencils down and I'll just stop creating for a few hours.

A lot of artists do that.

Musicians, sculptors and even painters.

Dana Zaman from Delaware, Ohio, just north of Columbus, did it for two decades, but now she can't imagine a life not making art.

The person who I am now that have a big journey.

I was a little girl and then I was a teenager.

I was a sister.

I was a daughter.

And then wife, mother.

Daughter in law and friend and teacher and student.

I felt the women's journey from inside and all the pros and cons or ups and downs.

I saw everything.

So those are my paintings.

So this is how I became an artist.

I am from a capital of Bangladesh.

So you see people everywhere and you hear honk and crowd all the time until midnight.

And then I came to Indiana.

There was nothing empty land.

So it was quite the journey when I came here.

Then I couldn't paint.

I stopped because all this adjustment didn't I didn't feel like painting.

And, you know, creative people cannot do anything without they feel the hunger for it.

So I stopped and I stopped, stopped, stopped for 20 years.

I was raising two children.

I have two beautiful children.

I'm very proud of myself.

I raised two very kind and nice young adults.

So I couldn't focus.

I did one painting, I think in all 20 years my work was initially just painting.

And then eventually I started experimenting with different mediums like charcoal and these and that.

And then now I started adding more elements with my painting.

So it's not a painting anymore.

It became a sculpture.

It became I call myself interdisciplinary artist.

In women's life, we experience so many, replaced so many characters that we became interdisciplinary person.

So why not if I as an artist, if I work exactly who I am, then my painting or my work will connect with my audience.

My work will speak up.

And then, you know, the other women who are going through that journey, they can connect with my painting.

So this is how I do my painting.

But sometimes some paintings, I don't feel like it's done.

One of my most favorite series I have done in Pink Color, that's on body shaming.

Body shaming is a big part of my life too.

I have gone through that as well.

So but I was skinny, I was midsize, I was big, I was all sizes in my life.

But I didn't feel any difference in sight.

I was say me inside.

I loved my people.

I loved my friends same way when I was big, when I was skinny, I cooked for family.

I smiled.

I had same feelings, but people didn't react me with the same feelings just because of my size and retarded me.

You know, It was very painful.

I used to go somewhere.

Women used to talk in my mind.

I used to paint their expression when I used to paint their expression, I used to use my hand like this.

So when I started painting, after 20 years, I whole I took a brush and I was trying to paint, but I couldn't because nothing I couldn't feel any connection.

Then one day I thought, okay, let me try with my hand.

So I just didn't take the brush.

I started using my hand and then my real expression started coming out.

So then I realized in these 20 years when I used to think and paint inside my mind that help that actually took me from brush to my body.

So now I paint with my hand and I feel more connected and I feel with my painting, with my hand.

People feel more connected with my painting.

I can express more deep and more story.

The connection with the painting I paint for people.

I don't paint for myself well, I paint for my craving, my heart, my desire.

But I paint for people now because I have gone through so many experiences good, bad, hardship, painful, even I feel like some of the old is not healed.

So I have been through many experiences.

So but I think I became a very powerful person from those pain.

Not my happiness, not from the happy memories, from the painful memories and hardship.

I became a very strong woman and I can do something for other women.

So not everybody is as strong as me.

So I want I paint stories where you can see I'll show you.

Most of the women have masculine muscles in the drawing, and maybe they're in a box, maybe they're in a shell, but they are masculine.

So I want to remind them that, Hey, you are very powerful, even though this is not the right time, this is the darkest time of your life.

But you are very powerful.

Don't stay there.

Don't make yourself stand, suffer, Come out from that.

The world is way more bigger and you are way more powerful than you came.

Bananas don't grow on trees, and neither do arts events, but they do bear fruit each week in our free newsletter.

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On APPLAUSE.

Cleveland rapper Chip the Ripper is giving back by passing the mic.

thought of it as like a cipher, how people would get in a circle and display how good they can rap.

But I feel like in 2025 we need to display how good our music is We step inside this hip hop hothouse, better known as Pass the Ox, plus the student becomes the leader.

A sax man Chris calls brings his band to the Tri-C Jazz Fest for the first time.

All that and more on the next round of applause Terrorists bombed her art school in Baghdad, and that was the final straw.

Kubra al-Hilali packed up and left her home in Iraq and years later landed here in Cleveland.

Now she strives to present positive images of Iraqis and Arabs in her art.

So Kobra al-Hilali was born in Baghdad, Iraq, to a family of artists.

My dad, the artist, all the people around us do our music, drawing different things.

And my sister, she's an artist to all the family.

They was.

They do a lot of different kind of art and all the people around us.

So I just I start to paint when I was maybe six years old.

In 1996, her father, a poet, was forced to flee to Jordan and separate from Cuba.

I am the family.

They joined him there seven years later.

So when the war like America happened and after 2003, we left Iraq to Jordan, Cuba and her family lived in Jordan for almost a decade, but had to return to Iraq every six months to renew their visas.

During this time, Kubra decided to return to Baghdad and enroll in art school.

But it was a challenge.

It was really dangerous there.

In 2006.

It was a problem like especially for the women, too.

It was hard to go to school and not wait and her job and that and to study art.

It was so hard.

They don't accept it.

Then tragedy struck, and the last day I was there, it was like a big car bombing in the front door for that school.

Two colleagues from her school were killed that day.

After school, it was really close to my grandmother's house.

And when they hear the bomb, my, my, my uncle, he was threatening was no shows to the school to see, like he think like I'm not there.

So he was running to school with no shoes.

So that and everybody call my mom she was calling.

It was really hard and there's a lot of friends we lost a lot of friends.

So that's why I left school back to Jordan.

I came.

All the while.

Cobra's family was seeking asylum in the United States, and because a relative lived in northeast Ohio, she and her family eventually moved to Cleveland.

It was like a new a new life for us.

The Ohio Humanitarian Group us together helped Cuba and her family moved to Parma and got her work as a seamstress.

US together also helped Cuba pursue her passion.

They helped me to do art and to do mural, to do a lot of things and also workshop for student.

And then I have my studio.

I got a studio and I do the art for full time, like a full time job.

Cuba's first art exhibition took place in 2015 at the Negative Space Art Gallery in downtown Cleveland.

However, she realized those initial paintings were too challenging for her audience and for herself.

A painting of kids during the war with the war.

Due to the weather and due to the people, it was sad.

And I know it's something really hard to show it to people, but it's like it's happened.

There's a lot of kids they dead or they they are sick of all of the war.

So so we have to show it.

And and it was it was nice, but it was so hard to me to paint this and to be there front to my frame and front to the picture, the real picture.

I have to paint it.

It was so hard.

And I see one like in 2003.

I see what happened to there.

So it's all in my memory or what can I do for our just to show people because I'm here so happy to be here in America.

So I have to show people something.

What's happened there?

Following the catharsis of that first exhibit, Cuba has moved on to broader and more hopeful themes.

Because I'm Iraqi, so I have to show people we are.

We like peace.

We are.

We love art.

I have to show it to people.

So I focus on calligraphy with calligraphy and the like.

I am not focusing on it, but I added to my to to my art, to show where I'm from and also to paint more things for live the freedom and the peace.

Love.

She has also found inspiration in University Circle at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Actually, the museum inspired me to do more work, and when I go there, I see myself there and I feel fresh and I get more ideas as more things.

So it's it's my home when I feel like I need to refresh myself to go somewhere.

It's really fun for me, and it's a beautiful goal to refresh my mind, see the work there, and I really love to be there.

One of the works in the collection is of an ancient Iraqi guardian from the palace of an Assyrian king.

Yes, I did cry.

And my my dad, he cried too.

And it was very painful because, like the it's it's actually the history of Iraq.

It's all around all the countries and all the war, not only in here.

So I'm happy to see it here.

But it's it's painful.

There's actually a lot of our history there in Cleveland in the U.S. And it's really reminds me of home.

Thanks for joining us again, my friends, for this round of applause.

I'm ideastream Public Media's career, the Arts Machine.

Batya, we're going to leave you with music from a British composer.

You may not have heard of Samuel Coleridge-taylor not to be confused with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but the turn of the century composer who was one of the first black students to attend the Royal Academy of Music.

His music got the spotlight at Chamber Fest Cleveland 2024 and oh, by the way, Chamber Fest, Cleveland 2025 is underway now.

Enjoy Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.