On digital music goodies

Summer gives me the time to do a bit of exploring, even goofing off (fancy that). At present I’m voyaging a bit into the unchartered territory of my own software collection. Just as we do with books and CDs, sometimes I acquire software without having the time to get to know it adequately. And then there are times I just get some new stuff.

The music world is replete with seriously spiffy software and hardware; as much as any profession, music was flipped upside-down, inside-out, and transformed by the computer industry. Heck, in some ways music got there first: the ubiquitous MIDI protocol offered solid, if limited, networking capabilities back when a “network” meant running around with a 5 1/4″ floppy disc, or even sharing data cassette tapes or, mirabile dictu, a spool of paper tape.

Certainly computer-based instruments—and the proliferation of software instruments that has followed—are among the most remarkable gifts of all. Instead of a teetering rack of keyboards, all hooked together via a spaghetti of patch cords, one good weighted, balanced keyboard with a MIDI interface to a computer suffices, with the computer doing all the heavy lifting. Heaven.

And digital sampling has made possible such amazing stuff as “Ivory”, the digitally sampled pianos from Synthogy. I use the Hamburg Steinway in Ivory as one of my main practice instruments, controlling it from my Yamaha Clavinova CLP-280, an instrument with a superb action and thoroughly fine sound on its own account. Ivory requires substantial hardware to run; I can’t image trying to use it real-time with a modest computer or under memory limitations. Even on my über-powerful Mac Pro (eight processor cores, 10 GB of memory) Ivory can suffer from dropouts and the like, but they’re not all that common.

In addition to Ivory’s astonishing realism (most of us can’t afford to have our very own 9′ Hamburg Steinway in tip-top condition, but Ivory makes a damn good substitute), there are other dandy toys. There are also other fine software pianos, such as Native Instruments’s Akoustik Piano, which in addition to containing both a Hamburg and a Bösendorfer similar to Ivory’s (although not quite as sophisticated) offers a marvelous Bechstein concert grand.

Then there’s Logic Pro, a musical universe in a box. How many software instruments does it include, anyway? Synthesizers, samplers, beat generators, all sorts of goodies. Or processing equipment—limiters, compressers, reverbs, arpeggiators, mastering consoles, delays, vocoder, on and on. Full audio recording, editing, and mastering capabilities. Even an OK music notation module, although no competition to the big boys in that arena. If it isn’t right there in Logic, you can add in Audio Units—plugins. So I can use Ivory from within Logic Pro if I want, just as I can use SoundSoap (a first-rate tool for removing noise from recordings) or other stuff that I buy as extras.

And then there is the possibility of using ReWire, which enables one program to talk to another—say, if I want to use the Arpeggiator in Propellerhead’s Reason, I can hook that up so a Reason instrument is available to me in Logic Pro, or vice-versa.

And Reason is an entire universe in and of itself, filled with fascinating instruments and capabilities; I’m just getting familiar with it, but given that I have a leg up from having used Logic for some time, I’m making swift progress.

Music notation apps such as Sibelius and Finale are there to do the grunt work; Sibelius can also use Audio Unit plugins and also works with ReWire, amazingly enough.

Oh, it’s all pretty dizzying; I’ll never be able to master more than a soupçon of it.

However, many of us in the ‘classical’ music world have noticed a disturbing trend among younger composers in regards to tech. Because so many of them are using their notation or sequencing software to handle all playback of their compositions, they are becoming increasingly unaware of instrumental and/or physical requirements. I have lost track of the number of times that a composer has handed me a piano composition that is unplayable by a human being. Because Finale or Sibelius is perfectly capable of playing absolutely anything, at any tempo, composers have less connection with the real nitty-gritty world of the performing musician. Or more subtly, even if a passage in question is theoretically playable, it lies so awkwardly for the instrument that it might as well be impossible.

Are the days vanishing when you could practically feel a composer’s hands on the piano when you played his music, such as the case with idiomatic writers such as Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Debussy? A lot of their piano writing comes directly from the hand, which has governed the shape and feel of the passages. As a result, a pianist who takes on their compositions knows that the work needed to master a difficulty will pay off. But with some of today’s software-bound composers, sometimes we have to work like blazes just to make it work at all, given that it was written without any sense of the bodily presence of a player in mind.

We’ll hope that it’s all just a phase and the composers will wake up to the fact that they can’t write against their performers.

I’m also looking forward to seeing more and more amalgamation of these computer-based tools with concert music; so far there just doesn’t seem to be enough. I loved Mason Bates’s fusion pieces that the SF Symphony performed this past season; let’s have more of the same. Limitless possibility really ought to help to produce a wealth of fine music, and not just commercial drivel or obnoxiously inscrutable academic offerings. Training, familiarity, practice, and custom are yet needed, at least in the “concert” world. The popular folks have mastered it, and then some, long ere now.

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