Symphonies gingerly embrace digital performers
Pushed to cut costs and attract new audiences, some experiment with laptops.
By Mark Guarino | Correspondent/ October 23, 2009 edition
Every season at your local concert hall, the drill is the same: Musicians tune up their instruments, a conductor walks onstage, taps a baton, and works of past compositional masters spring to life.
This scenario has not been tampered with for centuries, a fact that many cherish and others lament about the symphonic experience. Now, threatened by the high costs of producing orchestral concerts, shrinking endowments, an aging subscriber base, and the slashing of music curriculums across the country, which diminishes the role of music in young people’s lives, classical music has arrived kicking and screaming into the Digital Age. Computers are helping change the way people make, perform, and listen to symphonic music.
“Orchestras are floundering,” says Greg Bowers, a composer who teaches music theory and composition at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. “They want to fill seats desperately. A lot of them are cowering, they’re afraid to do anything that may challenge the audience. Their patrons are older and less amenable to new things. So you have this incredible, aesthetic bind.”
Because it’s so difficult to have new symphonic works performed, composers increasingly turn to technology, where software can replicate acoustic instruments and perform an entire score without the need of a single, live musician. In the past, digital technology was used only to help the composer develop a work before it was submitted to a conductor for consideration. However, as concert seasons provide less room for new work and soloists yearn to perform works with an entire orchestra, computers are filling the void.
Now, new works under the classical banner are being performed onstage by combinations of computers and live musicians. Traditional orchestras are flirting with social media – for example, providing Twitter feeds during operas – or playing new roles, such as performing live scores to accompany the screenings of popular films. Even the concept of the orchestra is expanding with the advent of chamber groups that perform new works through live groupings of laptops and even mobile phones.
Paul Henry Smith, a composer and developer of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, says the development of cheap disc space and affordable processors has allowed sampling libraries to grow more refined, both in the number of instruments allowed and the shades of tonal quality available. Although Mr. Smith says hearing an acoustic orchestra “is still the best thing you can do” to hear symphonic music at its highest level, he says his device is a “viable, expressive instrument.”
Through regular concerts he performs across the country, or in recordings he provides to composers and soloists who request to hear their music accompanied by an orchestra, Smith demonstrates that software is not enough. His musical training is required to “conduct” the digital orchestra through a Wii controller and a board he stands on, both of which allow him to control tempo and volume.
Mr. Smith says the human element is essential in bringing out what he calls “the missing musical knowledge” of any score.
“When Beethoven writes ‘forte,’ or there are two melodies and one has to be more prominent than another, that information is not in the score,” Smith says. “You glean it from the score. If you don’t do that, it will sound as though you don’t know how to make music.”
That musical training may be slowly diminishing with classical music no longer a viable commercial radio format and schools cutting back their music curriculums. Brian Shepard, who teaches composition and music technology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, says he notices how adept freshmen are at writing complex scores on their computers but that they often can’t comprehend the subtleties that exist between different instruments or even harmonic registers – most likely because they haven’t heard much classical music performed live.
Mr. Shepard says digital orchestration is best used not to replace acoustic instruments but to add new sounds that composers living centuries ago had never imagined. “I love the orchestral instruments, but I also love the sounds that are created electronically. I don’t see it as an either/or situation,” he says. “I certainly hope [digital media] will expand our [aural] color palette.”
That is happening with the development of laptop orchestras in cities around the country. Through programming developed to engineer new sounds or to interact with modified audio components, these groups of six to 20 players use everything from joysticks to mouse controllers to drum pads to mobile phones to create orchestration that is considered the next level of symphonic music.
“Anything we can use as an expressive interactive medium, we take advantage of,” says Ge Wang, cofounder of laptop orchestras at both Princeton and Stanford universities. “You can think of it as a big sonic kitchen.”
Laptop orchestras have garnered legitimacy, entering the curriculums at music schools throughout the United States and with concerts held in prestigious venues including New York’s Carnegie Hall. Composer Wang, whose degrees are in computer science, says that despite the advancements in technology, the performances have to stand up artistically.
“The music has to matter,” he says. “The music and the experience should be something that stands on its own. I don’t believe that just because we’re using this new technology it validates what we are. We are truly here to try to make music.”
Wang’s Mobile Phone Orchestra at Stanford makes its debut performance in December. The group uses software created for the iPhones to create sounds. One of the sounds is the Smule Ocarina, an application Wang invented that allows users to blow through the microphone of their iPhone to create sounds, change pitches and keys, and play music with other users around the world in real time. Since the application debuted in October 2008, it has sold more than 1 million copies.
Its success takes computerized music one step further to democratization of a process that many consider arcane or even obsolete.
“In the end, they’re just making music, whether it’s with a computer or a cello,” Wang says. “What music they’re making is not that important. It’s the fact that they are unlocking expression within them.”
[Editor’s note: The original version of this story misstated Ge Wang’s name.]
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Comments
2. Paul Henry Smith | 10.23.09
I don’t think it’s quite fair to lay blame on older audiences. Something else far more important keeps symphony orchestras from embracing technology. (First, I don’t even think they should embrace technology unless it makes the musical experience they offer better - artistically better, that is.)
So, what’s holding them back? The thousands and thousands of hours invested in acquiring the expertise needed to play symphonic music on acoustic instruments can not be replaced easily. In short, there would have to be a huge, demonstrable benefit to entice any musician to give up that and begin anew with digital instruments. Blowing into an iPhone isn’t likely to offer that benefit.
When someone chooses to play the violin, they know that technology is not likely to be obsolete in the fifteen years or so it will take to become an expert. How many iPhone instruments will there be a demand for fifteen years from now? Now, if the skill and knowledge were easily transferable (like, say, between clarinet and saxophone), you might see more “embracing.” But when there is more to be lost than gained for individual musicians, you start to see why it makes sense not to make such changes.
3. Steve Fry | 10.24.09
Another facet here; the dumbing down of listening skill. People’s auditory discrimination has been pounded flat by metal/gangsta/soundtrack bombast, all that registers is 100db and above. No subtlety, no nuance, no shading/coloration/articulation… a three note riff and turned into a battering ram! That’s the challenge to the future of classical/orchestral music. Take it out of the schools and there’s not much to hope for. Is there excitement in new forms of ensemble with MIDI variations? Yes, but the very best digital wave function will always be light years from a priceless Strad in the hands of say, Josh Bell or Hillary Hahn.
4. Mary | 10.24.09
The recording and broadcasting industries which brought classical music into the lives of many, ironically helped spell the demise of music education by making it unnecessary to learn to play or compose music in order to hear it. That demise has meant a prodigious loss of musical sensibility in not only the classical but the popular forms of music. No ear becomes musically sensitive unless it first hears sensitive music. What must we do to assure learners will first hear quality so they can then reproduce quality? Is there a digital solution here?
5. Ryan | 10.25.09
I agree with the comment that this article is a bit unfocused: the story about musical experiments is not actually directly related to the struggles of symphony orchestras. In addition, this article presents some ideas but declines the more important task of evaluating them - I suppose from a certain point of view that’s “good reporting,” but the references to floundering orchestras and disappointing/nonexistent music education tell me that this is not a totally objective article.
So here are a few opinions (I’m a composer, so take them for what they’re worth):
The likelihood that the actual music being discussed here is particularly interesting is low, simply based on the statistical fact that most new music (like most old music by the way) is not that good. Add to that the tendency of new technologies to become gimmicks or fads and it takes a particular temperament to do something really aesthetically engaging (i.e., not just “viable”). That having been said, I know good work is being done, it’s just rare.
I will start really worrying about the downfall of symphony orchestras as soon as a major orchestra actually closes its doors and shuts down. They are still going, and still doing what they were created to do: perform canonical classical works, and the occasional piece of new music.
The obligatory jibes about music education are actually the most important piece of the story. A previous commenter summed it up well. What we need are not performers/composers/etc. (our universities and conservatories are overstocked with enough potential professional musicians to supply the next generation - granted many are not American, but foreigners have always played a major role in classical music in the US), we need audiences (informed, amateur musicians). This is what the musical curriculum could and should be doing: providing tools for the next generation to have as informed and meaningful a relationship with music as possible.
6. Dave G | 10.26.09
Ryan said: we need audiences
At $250 per seat (plus additional REQUIRED contribution) at our local opera, it is not surprising that the audiences are disappearing. I don’t have a solution, but if we don’t come up with one, the PERFORMANCE of music will become a hobby, not a profession. I say that despite having a daughter who makes a living (so to speak) as a classical clarinetist. That isk, if you can call $15,000 per year a living.
7. Lazaro Rafael Vega | 10.27.09
I have being using Finale for the last 14 years for all my music. I compose symphonies with its help especially for notation and printing is ideal . the sound is good enough for me, could be much better however, at the end I compose from my head and not from the piano. . it is the best tool a classical music composer can have these days. Or course nothing replace the sound and warmth of a real orchestra ( NEVER ). but lets remember that Beethoven had an real orchestra to his disposal most of his life so, it is the same thing just a tool for the composer . Lazaro R. Vega
8. Christopher Paul | 11.01.09
I think the “new technologies” are fine as long as there remains an appreciation for the skill of great musicians and what is required to create a pure sound with just human being and instrument. How to create this appreciation remains the question, especially as music programs are dropped from the schools. The answer is education-the question remains how to educate if its not being taught in the schools. We see a much different appreciation for music in many of the European nations where classical music can be a much larger part of everyday life and culture. While many symphony orchestras deserve a great deal of credit for offering outreach programs and free or discounted concerts, the cost factor of regularly hearing live music remains an issue. The trained ear and the ear that greatly appreciates music comes from time and much listening-preferably in the concert hall. I know for myself nothing compares to the experience of hearing beautiful music in the concert hall.
9. Charles Prazak | 11.03.09
The Mozart of laptop music has not yet been born. Music without limits or rules is, so far, just noise.
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1. Orion | 10.23.09
I don’t see the connection here between struggling symphonies and fringe experiments with electronic instruments. I’d say there’s no connection. People have been experimenting with instruments since the advent of the human voice — some of them stick, but most of them don’t. You’ve got two completely different stories here and you’ve combined them into one.