If you’ve got a bit of time to spare, this paper by Mark Marrington, delivered at the Coventry University National Music Performance Symposium on 10 June, is a fascinating read on the role that technology can play in musical performance.
Marrington’s paper takes as its jumping off point the legal spat between the New York branch of the American Federation of Musicians and a company called Realtime Music Solutions, concerning their product Sinfonia, which had been banned from use in future productions of the Opera Company of Brooklyn by agreement between said opera company and the American Federation of Musicians:
Rumblings had been apparent since the previous year when Broadway musicians had gone on strike over attempts to reduce the number of pit orchestra players, at which point the machine had been used as a fill-in to cover the shortfall. Broadway was shut down for three days as a result of this strike and the machine was subsequently demonized.
Marrington goes on to put the use of technology in music making into its wider historical context, makes the point that instruments like the piano can be seen in the same light, then discusses what it is that constitutes the essence of a truly live musical performance.
This is related to the world of Sibelius in that Marrington draws a parallel with the reception of the first version of Sibelius when it was released in the mid-1990s:
With specific regard to the activities undertaken by musicians prior to the computer’s appearance, its impact has been considerable. For example, in the early 1990s the first incarnation of Sibelius Software’s score-writer removed in one fell swoop the labour-intensive task of writing music down on paper. It made explicit the fact that much of the activity of creating musical scores prior to the computer’s involvement was repetitive in nature, often involving the copying by hand of passages of music dozens of times over. In the spirit of neo-Luddism - that is, a distrust of the new medium – it took composers whose medium was the score some time to realize that they had been freed, such was the extent of their belief in the necessity of this drudgery as part of the compositional process. As per my earlier point on the importance of performance apprenticeship, this probably stems again from a need on the part of artists to relate the worthwhileness of their creations proportionally to the expenditure of effort in their production.
Overall, it’s really a fascinating read, and I commend it to you.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not subscribe to this blog via RSS or email?
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
Comments on this entry are closed.