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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 ($9,450 US) per week. Sinfonia consisits of 2 PCs, one master and one backup, controlled by an trained operator using a musical keyboard."
The musicians are not going to be any Less Miserable.
:)
Sorry
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At least they didn't outsource their jobs to India !
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
What is the point in going to see live, but fake, music?
Just my 0.02$
DrkBr
What not replace the entire orchestra with a CD player? Then you avoid having to use the Sinfonia's capability to play along with live musicans.
The actors and set could also be replaced by projecting an image of a pre-recorded performance onto a large screen.
If there was a way to distribute this recording, people could watch it on smaller projection screens at home, and avoid the cost of theatre tickets and the hassle of having to travel to the theatre.
The only hard part would by syncronising the CD player to the projection, but I'm sure someone will come up with a method in the future.
The point of going to a live show is just that -- to hear live music from an orchestra of real musicians. Jean Michel Jarre, in particular, has already lost a lot of concert-goers when they found out he sometimes used pre-sequenced synths instead of using an army of keyboardists and playing the lead himself, live.
Sure, some people go to a musical just for the lights, costumes and action... but how many are there? Surely the majority go for the music?
>Art should be a form of expression, not an automated process
The average West End musical is a form of business. The main art involved is that of making a profit.
Although he can replace half, there are still jobs that he needs real musicians for. I wonder if those musicians would boycott or try to put him under pressure to use real musicians for everything? They must still have some leverage if they are needed for the parts that computers can't do...
If the show is not making enough money then that is because it is past it's "sell-by" date. If it's just to make more money by cutting costs then it's pretty disgusting really. Yeah, he might make more money but how about putting money back into the community of musicians who made LM possible when computerisation was not an option? Guess I'm just an old softie really...
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..
This sig is in Spanish when you're not looking....
I would gladly spend "full" price to see a performance which was originally meant to be done by machines. But if the spirit of a performance is changed solely to cut costs, the savings should be passed along to me, or I'd rather spend my money on the real thing.
This issue led to a battle between producers and the musicians union in New York last spring, which eventually resulted in a four-day strike ended by a new contract brokered by the mayor's office. The compromise preserves live orchestras, but reduces the required size. Most media coverage has expired (or moved into paid archives) but a simple Google search turns up:
Anti-synthesizer advocacy site.
Sinfonia article.
Settlement story.
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.
$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.
If you've been following this story, you see that the musicians aren't being replaced merely for the sake of autmation. The issue is that the particular theater is tiny, and the musician's pit can hold only about a dozen musicians.
The producer's viewpoint is that people who go to see Les Mis want to hear the full Les Mis sound, so he's using recorded music to fill in the for the people that the pit doesn't hold.
Mackintosh says he's been forced to do this by moving to the smaller theatre because the pit can only accommodate 11 musicians. Where exactly does the Musicians' Union want to put the rest of the orchestra? Suspend them from the ceiling?
Reading the rather limited blurb about the Sinfonia on the manufacturer's site, it's not like the orchestra or conductor is playing to a click-track or anything, the Sinfonia is operated by someone, presumably playing along to a piano part or some other lead part under the control of the conductor, then the synths on it follow that. Which means the conductor still has overall control of the orchestra, and it seems that the Sinfonia operator can even repeat bars or whatever, in response to what's happening on stage (although in a professional musical, an actor forgetting their line is somewhat unlikely, those things run like clockwork).
Yes, there's no substitute for live musicians, but if it's a case between the show going ahead or not (such as this case on RMS's site), then the answer is obvious to me. It's rather amusing that the musicians' unions are worried, they should be comforted in the knowledge that they can do better than a synth. Indeed, RMS claim that the Sinfonia can free up room for more live musicians by reducing the need for seperate synth players.
Still, I'd like to have a play with it before I'm fully convinced :).
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.
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So they outsourced the musicians eh? Well, at least the drummers are safe.
Les Miserables is a musical, not a play. The music is vital for setting the mood of the piece. Each character has his or her own motif which lets gives you insight into the characters. For Wagner, this was almost more important for character development than the libretto (lyrics) itself. When I go to a musical, I pay for the best seats so I can sit close to the pit. I want to see the conductor carefully watching the actors on stage and communicating with the musicians so that everything stays together. It is truly an amazing thing to see a large group of people perform together in sync.
When I was in high school, I got to see a touring company of Les Miserables. One of the parts I looked forward to seeing the most was after the barricades fall and Jean Valjean looks through the bodies for Marius. There is a huge oboe solo that plays the melody to Jean Valjean's song, "Bring Him Home." This music conveys to the audience that although Jean Valjean knows he will lose his daughter to Marius by saving him, he knows that is what he should do. As an oboe student, I listened carefully how the musician interpreted the solo. It was a rare opportunity for me to get to hear someone else besides my teachers, and a machine simply would not have been the same.
Once in college as a music major, I got to experience the musicians' union's pettiness. Many times we had to sit in rehearsal for several minutes not allowed to rehearse because our morning rehearsal had gone over several minutes and the union members' lunch break had to be exactly sixty minutes. However when it came time to play, people would get over their egos and make music. (Musicians have always been difficult to deal with - Bach stabbed a bassoonist and Handel tried to throw a soprano out a window!).
Next month, my elementary school music students are going to get a great opportunity. The Nashville Opera company is travelling to our rural mining town and performing The Barber of Seville. The school had a choice whether to watch the performance on a live internet broadcast or have a scaled down version of the opera travel to the school. We chose to have the opera come to the school because seeing it live will engage the students better and just be more exciting for them. The children are prettty pumped about it, too.
It saddens me to think that Les Mis has to move to a smaller theater because of declining ticket sales. Perhaps it would be better to let it close with a little dignity instead of letting go on forever like Cats. But Cameron Macintosh was responsible for Cats lingering on forever too!
Les Miserables has to move out of its current theater because of renovations, and the theater they're moving into is the only one currently available. But, as it's quite a bit smaller, there's not enough room for the orchestra. But I find it odd, then, that the stage is big enough for the show (which, itself, is quite big) or the cast (which is also quite big), but the pit isn't big enough for the orchestra. And, of course, by ripping out a row or two of seats, the orchestra pit could easily be expanded. But no one wants to do that, because it would cut into the profits. The easiest thing to do for audiences who mostly don't know or care about the difference between virtual music and live music is to replace musicians. But at what point does reducing Les Miserables or any show make it no longer the same show? At a certain point during the Broadway run of the show, they just cut 15 minutes out of it to get it to run under three hours so they would have to stop paying the cast overtime. But the ticket prices, of course, didn't go down. Rest assured that audiences paying to see Les Miserables in London will not be paying less for fewer live musicians. The difference will go right into Cameron Mackintosh's pocket, as is always the case.
Personally, I think when it comes time to start cheating the audience out of the full experience of the show, as in either the current London case or the Broadway one I mentioned above, it might be best to just close the show and move on. But that's speaking from an audience member's perspective--from the perspective of someone who is something of an industry insider, sure, take the customers who don't know the difference for as much money as you can. The ones who do know the difference probably have already seen Les Miserables one or more times and have no desire to go back to see a reduced version of the show.
--Matthew
"If the lights of Broadway blind me, I won't mind..."
To address a few of the concerns raised here:
Les Mis is not a play, it is a musical. In fact, there is little to no spoken word in Les Mis making it almost an opera, which would make the music quite important.
Many people seem to think that if all the musicians are doing is playing from the score, then a machine may as well be doing it. To me, that's like saying, "if all the actors are doing is reading from the script, then we may as well replace them with robots." The fact is, despite the mess of markings that is a classical score, there are many more things not on that page that musicians are expected to fill in. There is a passion and subtlety of emotion, expression, articualtion, and sound that no machine can reproduce.
As a classicaly trained musician soon to graduate with my Master's in performance, I may be a bit biased, but the majority of my training hinges on those very points. Playing the music on the page is a given, you just have to be able to do at least that. What gets you a job and makes the music worth listening to, is doing more than what's on the page.
Now admittedly, that's hard to do for a show that's been running for so long. Many people have pointed out the business end of this decission. So, lets look at this from a business point of view...If the market demand for performance of this show no longer supports it being preformed in a space big enough, then the market has no more need for this show. Maybe it's time to learn a new show.
I think that all adds up to about $.04. Thanks for reading
There's a musician's union for the West End. Union rules specifically state how many musicians need to be hired for any musical specifically to STOP this from happening, ie, to keep Broadway musicians employed. Believe me, if they could get away with it, pit bands would've been replaced by a CD player a long, long time ago. Broadway is exactly the same way.
McIntosh wants to replace half the orchestra, not because of artistic reasons per se, but because of practical ones - Les Mis is moving to a theater with a much, much smaller pit that simply can't accompany the number of musicians hired by the current production.
It's ALL business. Don't think art has anything to do with it. THey'd replace the actors with robots if they thought it'd make a buck and save a few more.
Triv
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? :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
(FYI, the most useful definition I've heard is that rap refers to the musical form, hip hop to the culture, which also includes breakdance and grafiti art)
Rap is a drum machine and a rhyme dictionary in the same way that blues is four chords and a gravelly voice, or jazz is hitting the wrong keys and pretending you did it on purpose, or rock is two power chords and a stage show, or classical is machine-like repetition of a score. There are recordings that fit those descriptions, and before you get used to the form it might all sound like that. There's also a hell of a lot more to it -- but if you don't care to learn, more power to you, it's probably not for you anyway.
If you like rock, or blues, or jazz, or classical, though, you are hereby prohibited from making stupid generalizations about rap.
Right, because I'm sure all the DJs out there have no clue how music works. Maybe you should try spinning sometime, and maybe you would how much musical understanding you really need in order to be a good DJ. Not only do you have to know a lot of musical theory in order to make a halfway decent mix that sounds concrete, you also need to be quite good at keeping track of both songs (or in some case 3, or in some case other things like a 404) because you need to be able to figure out the precise place to start mixing the two together.
Tons of people have invested just as much into being a DJ as people who play instruments do. In fact, if you want to look at it in purely financial terms instead of that and time, then I'll bet the DJ spends quite more to get their setup and records.
Your post was insulting to DJs as well as having no valid points at all.
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