At 07:42 PM 3/4/03 +0100, Mr. Liudas Motekaitis wrote: >If we compose for 'perfect' MIDI to perform, we are then not >composing for humans.
Your "we" doesn't speak for me. When it's needed, I compose the work *through to its performance*, and where I feel it's appropriate, I leave out the "middle management". >When composers leave works, they leave them for humanity, not for the >instruments on which they were performed. Isn't that called orchestration? Seriously, though, even if I take you to mean specific physical instruments with serial numbers and purchase-by dates, there is plenty of that. The music for St. Mark's in Venice comes to mind. Whether we stretch these to fit contemporary performance situations doesn't speak to their original intent at all, which was quite specific. And that continues to this day, with installation-specific performances and instrument-specific composition. Even if you soften it to mean music for specific organs, or for the abilities of natural horns, and so forth, you still change the music through performance interpretation. You may consider that a good thing. I do not, unless I have left the door open for that to be done. If I specify acoustic viola and guitar, I expect that. But if I specify a suzalyne and sympitar I do *not* expect a viola and 12-string. And if I specify a virtual orchestra (as composer Jerry Gerber does in his marvelous compositions on his "Moon Festival" and "The Art of Midi" CDs), then I don't expect a real orchestra until I re-score the composition so the real orchestra can handle those demands. (And, needless to say, there are many piece which are simply unplayable in hands with only five fingers and muscles made of flesh.) >Then we can do with these works >what we want, since they are ours to enjoy. That's the first convincing argument *for* the new copyright law extensions -- keepin' yer doggone hands off'n 'em! :) >Sure. But just as appropriate as it is for a priest to issue the Sacrament >of Penance via email. It may work, but the question is does it work the way >we would want it to? We who? Again, you don't speak for me. Not that I have any use for priests or sacraments, but then I'm from the US, where the drive-thru church was invented. >The goal >here is to be as close to the original sound as possible. The "original sound" is in the gossamer mind-ear of the composer. How that works itself out through successive perturbations by editing and re-scoring and instrument quality and performer skill and performer interpretation and hall acoustics and recording equipment and playback equipment and room acoustics and background activity and time and place and culture is much like a compositional equivalent of "telephone". How many times does it get transformed before it's no longer what the composer had hoped for in setting it down? I understand the counter-argument where time & place & availability have changed what can be done. There was, after all, a time when thumbtacks-on-felt was the pit orchestra's equivalent of a harpsichord. Even Landowska's Pleyel was a piano-based brute. And we're re-learning the value of natural horns and different temperaments. But that should not mean that we *prefer* the distorted performance to the accurate one, at least if we're talking about composition instead of theatre. Why should distortion be the goal of performance when it is not the goal of the rest of the process, from composition/orchestration/notation through sound reproduction? And, from my point of view, "as close to the original sound as possible" is what can be more successfully and richly achieved if the composer is also the realizer, whether acoustic or electronic. The rest is all secondary, how does the line go? Sounding brass and clanging cymbals? >Those who stop trying are >no longer part of the art, but have succumbed to mere business. Sweeping statements, but wrong. We are in a golden age of composition, one the likes of which hasn't been seen since the early 20th century, and before that the early 19th, and before that, perhaps, the Ars Nova. There is a music industry, but *that* industry has given us a constantly cycling pop scene and the ThreeTenorsYanniBeethovenCycleAmadeusCharlotteChurch mentality. I know few composers in any medium who have 'succumbed to mere business'. >You need to either go to better concerts or build up a record collection. I guess the 4,500 recordings that I currently have won't do? Maybe you think, for example, the Horowitz Carnegie Hall return concert or, say, the Saint-Saens Second done by Rubinstein or maybe Richter's Tchaikovsky First are wondrous musical expressions? They were all hailed recordings and yeah, I have all those. But Horowitz couldn't get the notes right, Rubinstein jumbled up the rhythms, and Richter made it Richter's First, hardly looking at the composer's tempi and expression marks at all. I don't mind a few mistakes, but this is musical junk, all of it. As a composer, I want the performer *first* to play all the music -- that means, where I've specified them, I want the notes right, and the rhythms, and the tempi, and the expressions, and the articulations. That done, they can emote and interpret. But if they *don't* do that, then hand over the MIDI, please! I didn't write it all down to be disregarded, do I? >It is the perfect extension of your mind's powers of creation. It is the >physical acoustical extension of your own mind. It is a mirror of your >intent and only MIDI understands your creation. Humans are eroneous. Humans >get in the way. Humans make mistakes. Humans have their own vision, and this >is inferior to yours. There's the non sequitur at the end. Let's take this in two parts. First, if they have a vision superior to mine, they can surely write their own music and abuse it as they please. And second, this is never for me a question of mistakes and fallibility -- it is a question of hubris. Here's what I mean. Several years ago, I was called in to coach a prize-winning pianist in some Brahms pieces that I don't quite recall. Waltzes, I think. This performer had been heaped with praise, young, insightful, brilliant, and all that. But as I listened to her play for me, I heard something amiss throughout. I pointed out in the score where she wasn't effectively expressing the middle voice's rhythm, which was different from that of the outer voices. She looked at me blankly. She had been playing all the notes, and with plenty of doggone emotional expression and even accuracy, but it turned out that she had *never bothered to analyze the music!* She didn't have a *clue* about the grammatical meaning of the music in front of her, much less its deeper expression! It's like being an actor in a language you don't know. The performance can be idiosyncratic and even fascinating, but how can it be true to the author? Just think of Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law in "The Island of Dr. Death". The Hungarian didn't yet know English, a language from an entirely different group. He learned the sounds by rote. And it was wonderful because of its idiosyncrasy. But not because the words were understood. This is more typical than not. I have compared notes on some of my own scores with various performers. Some had the pages carefully annotated, whereas others had none. And the performances reflected that preparatory care or lack of it. (A read through "The Composer's Advocate" reveals that I'm not alone in observing this lack of care.) >This MIDI seems like a good friend, but let us see >where it leads: If you can count up the parameters involved in a human >playing a C# on a violin and construct a mechanism to indiviually control >each of these, you will wind up with nothing less than a human, with his/her >own mind deciding how to play that note. Again, the non sequitur. Assuming the sequence is true (and I'll only grant that for argument's sake), what I end up with is *my* humanity controlling the expression, and making the choice. It becomes me with *my* interpretive flaws. But I am the composer, and whatever failings that presents are mine, not some middle manager. Perhaps you have prejudiced yourself against the very idea of the effectiveness of this kind of musicianship just because it comes with the white-coat technological raiment that you appear to abhor, or because you, like most folks, do not want to consider the obsolescence of a trade they value, whether its demise comes from hopes for efficiency or, more likely, lack of interest. And I'm not suggesting that performance will disappear at all, but rather that it will be transformed. Already it is possible to apply the rhythmic subtlety of a given performer to another score. Already it is possible to convolve the acoustic space of a hall in such a way that an electronic rendering takes on that hall's characteristics. Already it is possible to adjust the layers of playback samples (in the form of Soundfonts of Giga samples) at a level of detail that as a composer I am, in reality, playing all the instruments with my expression and technique. (Turntablists have given us a whole new and vital genre of performance, but that's another discussion.) The only part missing in Midi is simple failure -- and even that can be added back in, if necessary. The principle behind "humanizing" algorithms is to make them error-prone in a stylistic way. And, for those in love with earlier sound textures, iZotope makes a plug-in called "vinyl" which emulates the sound of recordings from pre-electrical days forward. So no, I do not wind up with a human, I wind up with the performance as I conceived it. >This mechanism exists, by the way. >It's called a musician. You can get them at your local Music Academy. If you >don't trust the make of one, there are others. You can choose. Actually, >when you choose a piece of MIDI gear you are also choosing the one that you >think will give you more flexibility for the money. It apparently upsets you, but in this dysfunctional artistic culture, the errors and omissions seem the prime role of the performer, as if these are the mark of a human performance. A fine performance -- with notes, rhythms, tempi, expressions, and articulations done correctly -- is a rare state of affairs. And no, such performers cannot be found in my "local Music Academy". There are very few doing music of their contemporaries, and even fewer doing it well. With 627 compositions to my name (eat your heart out, Wolfgang!), a tenth of them commissioned by performers and half of all my music having been played, I think I can speak a little about performance respect of a composer's work. I look forward to every performance, and have been almost universally disappointed (rarely devastated, but that's happened as well!) The audience has not been disappointed, with numerous standing ovations. But nothing has yet come up to the standards that I have actually put down on the page -- and some are barely recognizable. (I mean that. One brass quintet had three out of five parts out of sync at the premiere.) Even where the performers are outstanding, the works have (due to economics) been under-rehearsed. And that is why this is not a rant against performers. They do the best they can, but economic circumstances conspire to weaken the new work they can do. Most performers, it also must be said, go for a high applause-to-effort ratio. An average-to-shoddy performance of Brahms's First will gain a standing ovation, where a superior performance of Ferneyhough will receive cool-to-polite applause and only occasionally a few cheers. So why work days on Ferneyhough when an afternoon with Brahms will suffice? (That's the real underbelly of the music industry, right there.) >Sounds like a case of the wrong musicians. I remind you that many great >pieces were sitting in drawers, forgotten for decades, before they were >given great performances, or any performances for that matter. Great performances may not be good performances. They are very often a "performer's performances", not an accurate realization of the composer's written scheme. A good performance may speak volumes more to the audience, but who would know if it doesn't have a chance? [Aside #1: I have the opportunity to interview young performers of new nonpop, and they have discovered the "old masters" like Cage and Stockhausen and Berio and Feldman. When they spend time rehearsing this work, they give it all manner of wonderful expression because to them it is no more new than Beethoven. That's a cultural advantage that argues against Midi.] [Aside #2: Like many composers, I will admit that I am lazy if I can be. I'll put down only the number of articulations or expressions or instructions that I expect the commissioning performer will actually bother to read. That means later performances might need revisions, or I might have to withdraw for a full rewrite. So those that are "sitting in drawers, forgotten" (or on my hard drive) may not get as vital a performance as I heard when I was writing them. I do not deny that such laziness is my fault, and I can't expect a superior job from them.] >If the piece is >good then, in some paraphrased words of Mahler: "It's time will come." A very Mahleresque, romantic notion. Do you have any idea how many composers are in the world today? So many that for even the geniuses among them, their time will never, ever, ever come. Where it might be possible, the music industry -- not the technology industry -- has seen that it won't. (Anybody watch this year's Grammy awards? Case made.) >But it does indeed exist. In the words of Shostakovich: "No performance is >as good as the performance which is available to the imagination." But MIDI >is a watered down version of acoustical reality. Precious few parameters, >compared to a real soundwave, let alone an imagined one. Again, I think you have prejudiced yourself against it. First, we are still using the Midi 1.0 specification. That 1.0, the first, the earliest is still being explored, with generations to come. Secondly, though the Midi portion is only the mechanical equivalent of the score, *because of its implementation*, it is indeed capable of finer performance detail in the final result than the bulk of any you'd hear by most gigging players. I won't try to make the case for it in that regard, though, but I'd suggest that a few solid months with decent multitracking studio software, samplers, algorithms and expression tools might be a worthwhile investment in time. >Hmmm. Next time you're at the opera, why not just read the program notes and >stay outside? Probably get the same experience anyway... Opera is spectacle. I was speaking about music and Midi, and I don't think Midi does opera. (If it did, I'd stop using it.) See sig. Ahem. And now, on to read the book that just arrived from the technological maw of amazon.com, Mark Ballora's "Essentials of Music Technology". Gotta keep up. :) Dennis His vampire opera in progress: http://bathory.org/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
