Wall Street Journal Article-Music/Computers

[ekeys]

Interesting Read. Check out how some classical musicians are embracing technology.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117832128175492832.html?mod=home_we_banner_left

[blue2blue]

I tried their game of spot-the-fake orchestra...

 

Oh, gosh, it was hilarious... the Journal's little tabbed interface player so thoroughly confused Firefox that all four snippets started playing at once when I went back to try to replay them.

 

I reloaded and listened again.

 

OK... I guessed wrong. I picked the most hyped, fake sounding and it was the Chicago Phil. Damn those multi-mic classical recordings! (I then went for the flattest, most boring sounding recording -- wrong again, dammit!)

 

But I have to say that NONE of them sounds like a symphony because nothing sounds like a symphony. Certainly nothing that comes over a wire and through loudspeakers.

 

I see a real symphony orchestra 7 times a year and, inevitably, at least a few times a season, I find myself confronted with a shopworn crowd pleaser that I haven't been able to listen to since jr high with a straight face and it is at those times that I really listen to the sound of the orchestra and ponder how very, very different it is than any recording I've ever heard.

 

 

Anyhow, I think tools that let composers hear somewhat realistic representations of their orchestral scores are a great thing. (And I'd be surprised if the next Bernard Hermann didn't cut his teeth on a synths and samplers. There are certain economic realities in today's film world.) And I've never had a problem (per se) with avant-garde music combinging orchestras with synths in order to exploit the non-orchestral sounds electronic instruments can create. A little Cage and Stockhausen are good for the soul. If not the subscriber list.

 

But it scares the crap out of me to hear people talk about filling out an orchestra with "robot players" because of budget constraints in order to put on the standard symphonic repetoire.

 

At that point I think you have to start thinking, change the rep... maybe your town should think chamber orchestra. (Of course, hard to do the 1812 Overture justice with 20 or 25 players. )

[John Sayers]

I didn't pick it either but I agree with the professor who said it was more obvious when you hear the whole track.

 

I did it once when a friend asked for orchestral backings for opera songs. I wrote it in with midi, it was very tedious and time consuming. In the end I had this extremely complex tempo chart with tempo changing 3 - 4 times within one bar.

 

Good luck to them I say

[blue2blue]

One obvious danger is that the difficulty of the task of creating the secquence with all the articulations and virtualized performance technique simulations would likely lead to a real standardization of how a given work "should" sound...

 

If all the shrinking regional orchestras should start performing with half or more of their musicians replaced by what would likely be one of, at most, a tiny handful of available scores, we'd likely see the notion of interpretation reduced to tempo choice, as these robocop orchestras plugged themselves into the orchestra-minus-x paradigm.

 

 

When we're talking symphony hall, synthesizers should ONLY do the work God clearly must have intended of them: to make weird sounds you can't get with other instruments.