The Future of Orchestras?

[stevel]

Originally Posted by Violoncello

His point is that for the first time in history, wholly new sounds can be created where the modern symphony orchestra is the evolution of primitive instruments fundamentally based upon striking (percussion), blowing (winds/brass), bowed (strings).

Sorry, but your friend's ignorance has teed me off so much I can't keep quiet:

Electronic music is based on an oscillating sound source. That source is either created electronically, or by sampling other existing oscillating sound sources. A Speaker is ultimately the "instrument" that poduces electronic music. If you want to get techinical, you cause a cymbal to vibrate by by striking it repeatedly (roll). You cause a speaker to vibrate by repeatedly sending positive and negative voltages to it. Same $%&* difference. Just one is triggered manually, and one is triggered using electrical voltages. If you could stand behind a speaker and manually move it fast enough to make it vibrate at an audible pitch, you could "play" it too.

Furthermore, acoustic instrument sound waves are so complex that electronic instruments don't even have the cabability of reproducing anything like it. Now, maybe it's not fair to judge it against those parameters because it's not designed to do that - we just misuse it to do that (i.e. tyring to make realistic violin samples) but most electronic devices are far simpler in their sound production mechanisms.

Yes, electronics can produce sounds a Violin can't. So can dropping keys on the floor. It's just that we haven't (at least until John Cage) accepted dropping keys on the floor a musical instrument or gesture. They are all simply tools to make sound with. It's HOW YOU USE THEM MUSICALLY that becomes important.

So maybe instead of arguing about "which is better", maybe you guys should be discussing how EVERY sound producing thing, and EVERY type of ensemble can be used ARTISTICALLY in EVERY type of music.
:-)

Very Best,
Steve

[Ron Ofir]

So maybe instead of arguing about "which is better", maybe you guys should be discussing how EVERY sound producing thing, and EVERY type of ensemble can be used ARTISTICALLY in EVERY type of music.

Amen to that!

[Ballaw de Quincewold]

Originally Posted by Ron Ofir

Amen to that!

And a big Hallelujah!

[Violoncello]

Sometimes I think upcoming musicians and classical enthusiasts are taught to be obsessed with the past because admittedly the music is good and easy to listen to. It also makes it difficult to move forward. They say it's easier to stick with what you know so only experimental groups and their listeners do something for today.

Modern composers however you judge them work in ensembles of all kinds but stand little chance of broadcast by any media.

[stevel]

Originally Posted by Violoncello

Sometimes I think upcoming musicians and classical enthusiasts are taught to be obsessed with the past because admittedly the music is good and easy to listen to.

I think there's also a practical aspect to this too. There's a large body of music for which notation was used. Notation also can be used on many other types of music as well. As a result, it certainly pays to learn to read notation. So rather than saying it's "good and easy to listen to", I might say it's easier to teach because so many things are constant. A Middle C in one work is a Middle C in another. It would be much harder to teach a student to play clarinet by saying - this blob in this score might be interpreted as any note you can play, and this square in this score is a cluster, so you have to play a multiphonic. Now go do it.

Of course the obvious solution is maybe we shouldn't be using traditional instruments to play non-traditional music, but as long as people want to "learn to play an instrument", that larger body of works in which there are some definable constants represents the easiest way to teach and learn.

We just gotta get people to learn there's other stuff out there too.

Steve

[some guy]

Not to wrench us all the way back to April or anything, but Shiva's comment that

The greatest composers in history wrote symphonies.

may have been a bit on the hasty side, eh? Bach? Bartok? Lachenmann? Cage? Schoenberg?

Indeed, since the symphony wasn't "invented" until the Mannheim crowd, right?, anything from the middle ages or the renaissance or the baroque would be out.

Even this seems hasty-like:

Their greatest accomplishments were symphonies- or opera or other orchestral genres, key word being orchestral.

So Beethoven's string quartets? Or Bartok's? (Oh, right. Already got him in as a nonsymphonist great.) Or Shostakovich's?

Piano sonatas? Chamber music generally?

Well, enough carping. Orchestras are indeed dying, but, as has already been pointed out, they killed themselves by not playing new music. So composers went elsewhere. Many into electronic studios, where you can record any sounds (including those of an orchestra if you're so inclined) and then manipulate them to your heart's content. Or you can use electronic circuitry to produce sounds, which you can also manipulate et cetera.

There's plenty of orchestral music, though, so even if there are only a few around, as museum pieces, there'll still be those few. I don't see even that happening for quite a long time, though, do you? I think orchestras will be around for a long, long time--even after no one is writing anything for them.

(Since I'm new to this forum, I'll ask. Is this primarily a U.S. forum? I know that most of the new orchestral music I know comes from Europe, and is recorded--if not played in concert--by European orchestras. But then, Europeans never quite got the hang of new music bashing, at least not to the extent of the U.S. or the U.K.)

[Thorolf]

Originally Posted by some guy

(Since I'm new to this forum, I'll ask. Is this primarily a U.S. forum? I know that most of the new orchestral music I know comes from Europe, and is recorded--if not played in concert--by European orchestras. But then, Europeans never quite got the hang of new music bashing, at least not to the extent of the U.S. or the U.K.)

Hello, some guy, and welcome to Music-Web!

I presume you’re from the US, and we indeed got lots of your fellow citizens here. Still, the site is hosted in the UK and the bulk of the Staff, and also approx. half of the members are from Europe and Asia.

So, this forum is truly international!



Regards