Klarinet Archive - Posting 000384.txt from 2003/03

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Richard Bush`s Letter to Actor's Equity
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2003 17:34:15 -0500

Anthony Wakefield wrote,
> I have seen the scores, and their idea of woodwind
>in twos is the same part i.e. unison, allocated to 2
>fl., 2 ob., 2 clar., 2 bsn.

Yes. This type of goofy scoring comes naturally when writing music on a
computer, if the composer doesn't work with living musicians. On the
Sibelius Music self-publishing site, I've seen many scores where some of
the parts could not sound as written, in real life. The Sibelius program
warns of notes out of an instrument's range (they turn red), but so far it
won't catch passages where there's no place to breathe. Without running
that score past a wind player, the composer might never know there's a
problem, because the computer will obediently play back anything whether
it's feasible for real people or not.

My favorite sounded reasonable on computer playback, except on closer
inspection, the composer had given the first clarinet 29 bars without a
rest. Only two or three other instruments were playing at the same time,
while the first clarinet part carried the *steady rhythm* with nonstop
eighth note arpeggios, mezzo-forte, allegro, completely exposed. The
composer plays the piano and those were piano-type arpeggios. Some
composers apparently believe that circular breathing is a common skill and
that any-old-body can do it nowadays, but that wasn't the problem with this
composer, because he had never heard of circular breathing. Without
circular breathing, there was absolutely no place in those 29 bars for a
clarinet player to take a breath where it wouldn't significantly and
conspicuously break the rhythm--and I'm not at all sure that even a good
circular breather could hide air intake in a passage like that one, where
the dynamic level and rhythm never changed. Meanwhile, a second virtual
clarinetist just sat there, doing nothing, the whole time.

I suggested to the composer (who took the suggestion and fixed the problem)
that he alternate those arpeggios between the two clarinetists, which is
probably what the two clarinetists would do on their own in real life,
unless, of course, management economized and told one of them to stay home.
I suggested to the forum in general that, in order to keep some control
over how musicians would phrase the music, composers might try *singing*
their wind instrument lines, but I wouldn't give a chipped reed for the
likelihood that many in the group will bother. As long as a computer
playback makes the score sound okay, they'll assume it *is* okay, and maybe
it is, if nothing but a computer ever plays the stuff. And once a score
like that gets into print, it gives management another convenient excuse to
let HAL perform it.

Lelia Loban
lelialoban@-----.net
New address!

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