On Jan 30, 2005, at 3:19 PM, dhbailey wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote: [snip]>Surely you are not comparing the relative worth to society of ice-delivery and music?
Depends on where you earn your income, I guess. Nobody in this discussion has brought up the spectre of eliminating music, certainly I hope not me.
We have been speaking of the eliminating of some jobs from one small niche of the larger music industry. And a niche that really doesn't affect very many people after all -- those who used to play for Broadway shows and those who could attend those shows.
Please don't talk about that in the past tense! 8-)
I'm sure you realise that it won't be long before "virtual orchestras" show up everywhere, making it not just one small niche of music that will be affected. TV and film music, dance shows, and more are already heavily into it. Even in this thread we discussed the possibility of it in opera orchestras. One thing that most musicians have realised by now is that most of the art they are going to be doing will be self-propelled and self-financed for the most part. Having paid work in subsidised or commercial music allows the practitioners to keep their chops up for the low-paid or unpaid art music they choose to do. In other words, most of the guys playing jazz are paying the bills with Broadway pit work, sessions, and the like. Elimination of this part of the spectrum means losing those musicians, or a large number of them, and virtual destruction of an art form.
Our local theater group still hires the same size orchestra they've always hired for their two shows each year, at least the same size they've hired in the 30 years that I've lived in town.
And good on them! I heartily congratulate them, because it is THEY who are targeted by the marketers of these synth orchestra thingies, as much as the big broadway producers. Have you seen the catalogue for Tams-Wittmark and others announcing "ShowTraks", which are synth realisations of the pit orchestra arrangements, on cassette and CD?
Thankfully your local theatre group still recognises the importance of real musicians to the sound, art, and community of local musical theatre, which is more than I can say for some groups around here. One of the groups I used to work for asked me to use these instead of musicians, and I refused outright. We used a six-piece band instead, which was small, but could turn on a dime, and was way better than the inflexibility of pre-recorded tracks.
Christopher
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