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Ask Slashdot: Resolving the Clash Between Art and Technology In Music?
An anonymous reader writes This article in The New York Times shows the clash of purists and people who desire to experiment with "new technology" available to them. The geek in me is really curious about this concept of a digital orchestra (with the ability to change tempos, placement of speakers in an orchestra pit, possibly delaying some to line them up ...). I understand that instrumentalists feel threatened, but why not let free enterprise decide the fate of this endeavor instead of trying to kill it by using blackmail and misrepresentation? Isn't there a place for this, even if maybe it is not called opera ... maybe iOpera?
All this machinery making modern music
Can still be open-hearted
Not so coldly charted it's really just
A question of your honesty, yeah, your honesty
Rush, The Spirit of Radio. Full lyrics easily found elsewhere. This was the first thing that popped into mind when I saw the summary. That was recorded in 1979 and released in 1980 according to Wiki.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I personally don't find the sampled sounds to be as nice to my ears. But the threat of boycotts, coercion and retaliation against artists that choose to use a new medium is nothing more than unionism to protect salary and I find *that* despicable.
I may be older than the bulk of the /. crowd, but some of my favorite music simply *cannot* be played by an orchestra. I remember when they had the same lame outcry against electronic instruments.
Are these people looking for stagnation? I suspect that new technology will produce all kinds of horrors (think synth and drum machines in the 80s) but all kinds of interesting things will no doubt come out. The music and the technology that make the music should be an endless dance. Acapella continues to amaze and that is about as technology free as possible, yet some acapella is generated by having a single singer and playing games in the recording studio.
Some painters use amazing techniques to blend and layer very complex paints and lacquers to great result; yet Picasso apparently used a common house paint for some of his greatest works.
Often the medium is the message. For instance if a wood carver is working with wood they might allow changes in the grain of the wood to dictate what they are doing potentially resulting in beautiful art. Yet putting a block of wood into a CAM machine and allowing a 3D design to be precisely cut can generate a whole different and also pleasing result. One or the other is not necessarily wrong, just different.
So if a purist wants to be pure then they should have fun with whatever purists that want to play with them; but the moment that they tell another artist to stop what they are doing then it is no longer art but a stagnant religion.
Let me start by saying that I think anybody should be free to put on whatever kind of performance they want, and if people come and pay for tickets, so they make money -- terrific.
But this whole thing is a little weird to me. The entire style of singing in traditional opera (especially Wagner, which is what this particular story is about) is predicated on traditional acoustics, without electronic enhancement. Those crazy warbling sopranos do so to differentiate themselves timbrally from the orchestra and allow their voices to get to the audience. A singer otherwise would often get lost among the wash of sound from a 100 orchestral instruments.
So, if you want to get rid of the acoustic instruments, why the devil keep the operatic vocal performances the same? Give the singers microphones and let them perform in varying vocal styles, as done in most pop music and on Broadway these days.
This all strikes me as an incredibly odd project -- they're going to replace musicians with oodles of speakers pointed in various directions to simulate musicians playing? All of this technology to propagate an art form whose style of performance and singing is predicated on acoustic real-life performance?
And why bother with all the sampling at all? Why not just hire real musicians to perform, record them, and then play that back with just the singers doing their thing? Surely the investment that's going into this to figure out how to place oodles of speakers, getting all that sound equipment, etc. could probably pay for a one-time investment in a decent karaoke-style recording of actual instruments?
From TFA:
Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in New York, likened it to operatic karaoke.
That sounds precisely like what it is. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- if they can get somebody to pay for it, why not? I don't get why the heck anyone would want to do with opera, whose aesthetic is all about low-tech, but whatever floats your boat.
For the purists, there is one further question, though:
Staging a "Ring" cycle in Connecticut with a digital orchestra is the dream of Charles M. Goldstein, a musician and would-be impresario who was once an extra chorister at the Met, and who founded the Hartford Wagner Festival with the idea that one day Connecticut could become the only place outside of Bayreuth, Germany, to perform entire "Ring" cycles every year. He argued that there was no loss of jobs for musicians because, from the outset, he had never planned to use live players in the pit.
Here's the problem -- what does "perform" mean? Literally, from its etymological roots, it means to put something into its final form. Actual live music depends on responsiveness between singers and conductors and orchestra. Nothing is ever quite the same twice -- and that is often one of the cool things about live music.
This guy is proposing to "perform" pieces by using canned sampled pre-recorded "orchestras" (if I understand it correctly). I'm not saying it isn't an interesting idea, but why do it with Wagner or traditional opera at all? Is there really an audience who really wants to see effectively a dressed-up opera karaoke?
> drum machines are a rare site
Well, it's hard to open port 80 on them...
Drummers? The article is about musicians.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This.
And the reality of the matter is that digital instruments do a good job of replicating piano, organ and other keyboard instruments. They can also do a halfway decent job with mallet-based percussion. However, it really isn't feasible to digitally replicate the sound of non-percussive instruments like brass and woodwinds, because there are simply too many different things that a real instrument player can do to change the quality of the sound. For example, when playing a brass instrument, you can:
And so on. There's simply no feasible way for software to simulate all those different variables without modeling the entire instrument, and even if you did that, you'd have to have a much more complex input controller than keyboards or wind controllers or any other MIDI input device that currently exists. By the time you've learned to play something as complex as that, you'll probably find that it's easier to learn to play the actual instrument. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And why can't you afford to produce a full-scale production? A lot of the push for replacing live musicians with the VSP is coming out of the United States, where there are insufficient cultural subsidies. This development will only make the problem worse, as now the state or private patrons are even more likely to deny funding based on the fact that machines could technically be used instead. You don't see something like this in Finland, where even the smaller provincial capitals manage to put on operas with a full human ensemble, thanks in large part to generous arts funding (an approach that has also ensure wider interest in opera among the population in than in the US).