Broadway Musicians Replaced With Synthesizers 319
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by
timothy
from the making-love-to-a-corpse dept.
from the making-love-to-a-corpse dept.
wooferhound writes "Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they're especially popular with provincial or touring companies. But until mid-July — when 'West Side Story's' producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra's string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend. There are computer programs able to read and play back music scores — a boon to composers who can now hear their work as they write — and software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players."
Re:What is the issue? (Score:1, Informative)
And industry founded on the creation, performance, and appreciation of human creativity is about to suffer devaluation of the human talent upon which it is based.
Put down the bong. This is an industry like every other. If anything this will make the creators able to produce more works. You are just mistaking the workers for the creators. Also by reducing cost it should allow more people to be creators rather than workers.
Re:Live performance different from film (Score:4, Informative)
The conductor controls the tempo and cues just like he controls the orchestra now. You are replacing a bunch of musicians with one robotic one that the conductor controls. This means more folks will get to do creative work, writing and conducting and less the drudgery.
Re:Live performance different from film (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is the issue? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is the issue? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the composer. It is true that scores of earlier epochs left much of the detail out, and the only reason we know that the musician's deviation from the score isn't incompetence but "feeling" is because of a continuous performance tradition. Of course, with ancient music there's much controversy, because the scores have very little detail at all, but we're not sure exactly how these pieces were performed.
But there are plenty of composers who want their music to be performed exactly as notated, with the musician putting what he thinks is "feeling" into it. They have gone on to add so much detail to their scores that the musician couldn't possibly introduce something extraneous. Ferneyhough's scores are hyper-notated like this, as are a few of Ligeti's pieces (the Cello Concerto, for instance). Stockhausen and Xenakis have written scores where instead of a general metronome marking for the movement, each segment is specified as a certain number of seconds so that the conductor or musicians don't add any rubato.
Re:What is the issue? (Score:5, Informative)
I am a spotlight operator at our local theater and I can assure you that a Broadway show is different every night. This is what keeps the crew awake during something that could be incredibly repetitive.
Re:What is the issue? (Score:2, Informative)
Composers already do this quite easily as it's not uncommon to have synth instruments in a pit along with the traditional ones. Replacing your instrumentalists with automation really doesn't give you as a composer any more sonic freedom...you actually have more freedom when your music has to be interpreted by a performer.
BTW I am a composer...it's what I do for a living...and I do it in theater.
Re:Great musicians have embraced new technology (Score:1, Informative)
The only thing is, Bach didn't make the piano his bitch. JS Bach rejected the piano when he first saw it. He didn't see a piano he liked until 3 years before his death.
dom
Re:What is the issue? (Score:1, Informative)
I don't think you have ever been to hear an orchestra. :(
Speakers sound nothing like acoustic instruments. There are so many issues of distortion, frequency and phase response, radiation patterns. And that's even before you start considering the problems of capturing a three dimensional acoustic wave-front by sampling it with a one dimensional microphone diaphragm.
I have heard what would be considered the absolute best studio monitoring systems, in acoustically treated control rooms, with the most accurate microphones available. It's still immediately obvious that you are not listening to a live acoustic instrument.
I don't mean to say that recorded audio is always inferior, it's an art form in itself. In the same way, films are not necessarily any worse than watching live actors. It's just that our methods of recording and reproducing audio are still pretty primitive, and sound so obviously different that we don't even imagine getting accurate reproduction any more. Which is kind of sad really.
Re:E.g., Potsdam 1747 (Score:3, Informative)