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Computers Replace Musicians In West End Musical
Albanach writes "The Scotsman newspaper is reporting that despite opposition from the Musician's Union, Sir Cameron Mackintosh will proceed with his plan to replace one half of the musicians in his musical Les Miserables with a computer synthesiser. The Times claims that using Sinfonia will allow the show, the third longest running musical in history, to replace 11 musicians saving 5,000 GBP ($9,450 US) per week. Sinfonia consisits of 2 PCs, one master and one backup, controlled by an trained operator using a musical keyboard."
that the salary of a professional musician ,who has most probably spent years of training and hard work ,working for a major west end production makes only 450 a week(and this figure is most probably gross).Waiters earn this sum working 7-8 shifts.I mean what happened to cultural society?
How many musicians give up just because they cant survive on these wages?I am appalled.
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I was just about to bring up the hypothetical situation that the music has to be adaptable to any hiccups that occur on the stage - i.e. an actor forgets a cue so the orchestra plays an extra intro bar.
However, I was working in the theatre when the first automated lighting desks appeared and a skillfull operator could always adapt or delay when changing to the next "scene".
Having said that, lighting is secondary to the performance compared with the music - jumping around the place would be kind of stupid. How do they cope with non-scripted events?
I'm also of the opinion that we pay pretty high ticket prices to see a "live" performance - both for the actors and the musicians - I think I'd feel ripped off knowing that it was a computer orchestra..
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I'm also pretty sure that a musician playing the actual instrument can change more parameters than you can change on a synthesizer simulating that.
Even if you had a perfect recording of sound you wouldn't have the same radiation pattern from your speakers as from real instruments. I'm sure that using this you can tell if it's a live orchestra or a bunch of speakers.
Most of us are only looking at some musicians who will be losing this particular job. When you have a career or an ability, you have to gauge your chances of marketing said ability. If I was a horse-shoer or a gaslamp-lighter, I'd probably not find many job opportunities.
It is said that these individuals have lost these particular jobs, but what about what others have gained? The producers of this show will save money, which means they'll have more disposable income to spend on other things they want (meaning new jobs in other areas). Maybe they'll eat out more, or go on more vacations. Or maybe they'll lower the prices of their tickets, which means the customers who buy tickets will have more disposable income to spend money elsewhere.
Like Bastiat's "Broken Window" myth dismissal, this job dismisall is also a bogeyman. So is "offshore job outsourcing." When some people can't do the job at a price the rest of us are willing to pay, then it is time to find new skills or promote other skills they may have.
All tariffs harm the economy, and fighting for jobs for musicians instead of using synthesizers is ludicrous. If the customer doesn't mind the lower quality inhuman music, why should we care?
>> replace the entire orchestra with a CD player
I think that's how They Might Be Giants got off the ground... they started out just the two of them and a cassette recorder, and it enabled them to do a lot of gigs that a full band couldn't. They'd just throw their stuff on the train and go play down in Philly or Baltimore, then take the train back to NY the same night; full bands with drums, amps, and stuff just couldn't play gigs outside the city. At a time when most NY bands were looking for that one score that would persuade the music industry to push them into the public eye, TMBG were able to quietly built an actual following.
I know reading the article is not considered good form, but it might be worth noting that the theatre they are playing at can only hold 11 musicians!
$10k per week? At a conservative $50 a pop, that's only equivalent to 200 people in the door - per week. It's sad that they're compromising the art for relatively small savings.
Good response. I guess what I'm saying is that I find the whole concept of enjoying difficult music for its difficultness is beyond me. Maybe it's just my own tastes, but my qualifiers for the music I like are just the sounds, plain and simple. If they're produced by a human or a synth doesn't matter, as I'm not listening to the method of production, but the sounds.
As for the exam, that's a bit of a flawed example (or, rather, it is flawed for a person with my approach to music). The important thing in a test is not the answers, but the knowledge of the answerer. Therefore, if they cheated, that doesn't change a secondary aspect, but a primary aspect. A better example would be if I had a list of questions I needed answered, and a friend answered them. Then he said that he actually looked up the answers on the internet. That's fine by me: I don't like the answers because they were given by my friend, I like the answers because they answer my questions.
I (mark_dot on /.) read Walter M. Miller Jr.'s The Darfsteller last year in "The Hugo Winners, Volume 1." A brilliant story about actors displaced by robots, who themselves are coordinated by a powerful central AI (machine). This real life story reminds me very strongly of The Darfsteller. I strongly recommend Miller's 50-page short story if you find this real life story intriguing. :)
The thing that concerns me isn't the lack of musicians (even though I'm a musician myself.) It's the non-live sound that a synth gives. As an oboist or flautist or whoever blows, their breath has subtle shifts in it; air pressure, lip tension and so on. Even though those variations are very much in the background, they can be picked up by the audience, even subliminally. Same with the vibrato that strings players use. A keyboardist (and I am one) can't hope to emulate all those nuances with ten fingers, no matter how skilled. You end up with the pre-recorded samples playing out their pre-recorded nuances, with all the feeling of a guy locked in a recording studio playing scales at different volumes.
And heaven help the production if the Sinfonist happens to have emotional problems before he shows up! All those get magnified by however many instruments he's playing, and suddenly you have all the violas and tubas feeling the sadness of breaking up with their girlfriend!
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As long as the computer is synched with the group by a person, the quality of this will be more than acceptable.
If you're listening, you'll notice that much of TV and movie music is already computerized (often with one or two real woodwinds or a real guitar, which gives it enough life to satisfy nearly anyone).
And, although the tradition of theater is for live music, our musical environments and tastes are constantly being shaped by techno, hip-hop, and even rock that relies upon computerized beats aesthetically (intentionally, to create non-human sounding grooves etc.), so many people like what they hear.
I remember being surprised reading Miles Davis' Autobiography, where he talks about making the switch to a drum machine for his records (in the 1980's). He basically said that it was easier, sounded great, and the time was better. He was convincing.
Now, in terms of putting musicians out of work, and creating a culture where most musicians don't have a chance to learn to be great by playing in bars, cafes, and pit orchestras (even Stravinsky did this in Paris), instead giving us a stream of good musicians who can't interact with a crowd or good-looking performers with shallow musical abilities? That's another, and much sadder, story.
Being a musician myself (violin + percussion), I have heard many stories of this, where live musicians are being replaced by synthesizers. I've never encountered this myself, due to the fact that I don't play professionally, but it is an ongoing trend. What is the point to go watch a performance if half of the orchestra is computerized? What's to prevent you from duplicating this at home (besides the obvious gap in technology)? Musicians already have a hard time finding a source of income, and now their niche is being replaced... On a sidenote to this, one of my violin teachers is/was in the process of getting A+ certified, just so he could support his income...
Your approach seems to be the "end justifies the mean" approach. There's nothing wrong with it, but many people go to these presentations to appreciate the means. There may come a time when holographic actors are indistinguishable from real actors, but some people will still have more appreciation for the human actors. It may not exactly be logical, but I don't think this perception will change anytime soon. On the flip side, others will appreciate the technology that went into being able to fake the whole thing, but I doubt theatres would bring in the kind of money they do for hitting the play button on a holographic projector.
The fact is that theatre companies can't all afford to hire and orchestra and pay for rehearsal space.
Might as well throw in a video screen, and just play a DVD while you are at it. Think of all the savings.
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Wow, I have just lost a lot of respect for Les Mis. I go to see a show such as les mis to expiriance the talent that goes into performing it, the stage performers, the musiciansa, hell, even the ingenious nature of the stage crew entertains me. I do not go to shows to hear a computer reguritate the same shit each time.
I guess I won't be seeing/hearing les mis anymore.
I say this as a computer geek, and a drummer.
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They can save a lot of money on trained vocalist actors by getting regular actors to lip-synch to studio recorded vocal tracks, too. So Le Mis becomes, essentially, a Milli Vanilla concert.
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It's not a musical, it's a horrible characterless corporate behemoth, just like most of the other musicals cluttering up London's West End as well as Broadway.
This "folly" has been used by road companies in the US for years and isn't going away.
Mackintosh absolutely wants automation to rigidly reproduce his vision. Have you seen Les Miserable or Phantom of the Opera? It's all about automation!
Mackintosh wants (and his audiences expect) a slick, uniform, standardized performance that's the same whether it's in the West End, Broadway, or Lubbock, Texas.
No one goes to see a production of Les Miz after all these years hoping it might be some bold new interpretation tonight. They go because they want to see the same production they saw 15 years ago. This technology delivers that.
Virtual orchestras are not jut being used in theatrical productions but seem to be comming fairly common and inexpensive. Personal Orchestra (personalorchestra.com) is $249 and sounds pretty convincing from their mp3s. Their being used by students to learn music. According to the Personal Orchestra website, Berklee College of Music and other colleges are requiring students to have virtual orchestras for their classes.
So, what are we in store for in the future. Going to see Synth programmers in concert?
Never been to a chemical brothers concert have ya? :) Im going to be a little hard on you because Im an electronic musician myself, electronic instruments opens up NEW avenues for creativity, you can be just as expressive with a filter sweep or a finely tuned spectral delay but the 99% rule still applies (99% of everything is crap).
As for Les Mis, you're dead on -- I hate Les Mis with a passion (and all the other early 90's "we're so cultred we went to a musical" bullshit pop-musicials -- Phantom of the Opera, and cats to name a few (and I don't care if cats is cool because it uses poetry as narative structure)), but i've seen just about every other musical there is, and going to the theater is about seeing people not about listening to synthesizers. It REALLY cheezes me off when you hear synthesizers used inappropriatley -- if I came to a Les Mis show in t-shirt and shorts wearing a rastafarian hat -- wouldn't that also be inappropriate? :)
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I think it is appropriate that "Le Miz" is leading the way in this area. I've seen a few of these mega-musicals, and they are theater for dummies. If you read the Hugo's book (highly recommended), you realize exactly how how little respect the producers have for the taste and intelligence of their audiences. It's all about getting people to shell out way north of $100 per seat so they can sit there with their brains turned off.
What they are trying to do is ape Hollywood movies with explosions and eye popping effects. These things require so much stage machinery that the orchestra ends up, no longer in a pit, but actually submerged underneath the stage. In order for the music to be heard, it is amplified and played through speakers. Canning the music is just the logical next step, and I suppose the step after that is to have the actors lip synch the songs.
I have to admit, the geek in me was pleased by the special effects where Javert jumps off the bridge in Le Miz, or the helicopter in Miss Saigon. But, it's telling that those are the things that stick with you more than a few days. For the life of me I can't understand why people shell out good money for the soundtracks to these shows. They typically have one fair to middling song, which is dutifully belted out according to the show-stopper template, and the rest is sonic wallpaper.
These kinds of shows are total crap with fancy window dressing. If you have the money to go to a show, you're better off going to something put on by a small local troupe. I've got more pleasure from college student productions than I had from Les Miz. Hell, I've seen high school productions of George Bernard Shaw that were much more memorable. Stay away from "hot" Broadway shows an their touring progeny, unless maybe it's Sondheim. I'm not a huge fan of his because he serves up a rather too steady diet of cynicism for me. But he doesn't condescend to the audience and there's always something worth seeing and hearing. The Witch's big song in Into the Woods is so much better than anything in Le Miz Claude Michel Shonberg should hang his head in shame.
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I want to say something, Dance music is by and large crap from all centuries and countries. That includes Polka, Techno, and Disco and I will be the first to say that there are masters of those arts, good imitators, and the great untalanted masses. Strauss has a few polkas that make you want to get up and dance like a peasant, Ladytron a current fav of mine for parties, and who can forget ABBA with waterloo and the like? There are masters in every genre, and I would say that even about DJ/RAP/Mixers of all sorts. I don't know any but I have friends who tell legends, (I can't remember the names in other words).
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actually these days, Fischer Spooner shows up with their CD, plops it on, and dances along to it. Basically, their live show is modern dance and lip sync'ing. And they are downright brazen about it!
As for music sounding dated, I've got mix cd with Yaz tracks right next to new Drum n Bass tracks. also, That dated sound is still sought out by some new bands, too (look at all the retro-electro, like Miss Kitten and the Hacker and Adult. ).
P.S.- that sounds like an AWESOME concert!
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