So each musician needs to become an engineer and learn what works best to deliver the correct sound when amplified, like Eric Friedlander has done. It's not easy, but it's too important to be left to folks who couldn't pass the music department audition and so entered the Recording Technology department.
No, and teaching is too important to be left to the same kind of people. Kodály had it right when he said, "Only the best musicians should be PERMITTED to teach children."
But our Music Technology majors DO have to pass an entrance audition on an instrument or voice, AND a playing Continuation Exam two years into their degree, and they have to take and pass exactly the same core music courses as performance majors. So this is not in any way an either/or situation. Yes, we do have some Tech majors who don't seem to be as GOOD musicians as some others, but that's simply individual variation.
And I expect that to improve. We used to have failed performance majors move into music education. No more. They have to pass everything the performance majors do, INCLUDING the Continuation Exam (a mini-recital and interview) at the end of their sophomore year, or they are not ADMITTED into the upper level music ed program.
(I know that last sentence is probably not fair to the many sensitive recording engineers who entered the field in order to do a great job in any amplification situation, but at least for two colleges I know about, my sentence just about sums up the situation.)
One reason we insist on our audio engineers being musicians is that part of their job is to translate arcane tech-talk into language musicians can understand, often under the pressure of recording deadlines. They have to speak--and translate--both languages.
Back a number of years a colleague in grad school at Indiana was asked by Igor Kipnis to participate in a recording of the Bach multi-harpsichord concertos in Germany. He came back amazed by the recording engineers, who could not only read music but could read full score and instead of saying, "there's something odd sounding just a little before letter G," they would say, "the third harpsichord is playing a Db instead of a D in measure 97." That's not a bad set of role models!!
John -- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
