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."

Comments

Did anyone notice.....

[Insipid Trunculance]

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.

Well, I was going to say...

[juglugs]

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..