>A historical precedent that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned here so far is sound film.
> The introduction of movie soundtracks in 1929 put thousands of pit musicians out of work almost overnight, just months before the start of the Great Depression.
>
> The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (and probably others as well, but I know the BPO's history particularly well) got its start from a bunch of unemployed musicians getting together in 1930 just to preserve their chops.
>
>Comments?
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Very interesting, but not the same.
Live background music with no dialogue replaced by recorded dialogue and recorded background music. Progress. Fighting it, like Chaplin did, was fruitless.
One of our problems is that, when some cheap producer tries to replace live music, the audience assumes that is the only way. In the ballet here, that does more and more of it's productions each year with recordings and less with live orchestra, the audience doesn't complain because they think it must be the only way it can be done. The newspaper critic doesn't mention that the orchestra is off that week, that we left a hole in our schedule and now have a hole in our budget, because he doesn't want to be a bad guy and hurt the ballet company. The only time the audience complained was the one year when the ballet cut us out of the annual Nutcracker production, because they remember that from year to year. (And this is not just about the poor ballet company. It's about making the big for-profit hospital company whose president is receiving a big award tonight for his support of the arts, put out a little more money to hire the orchestra all year long.)
Same way with the cheesy small combos in Vegas. The people think that is the best that can be done. They don't know any better. So when the opportunity comes for us to educate the public to ask at the Broadway ticket office "How many musicians in the orchestra?" before they plunk down their $100 a ticket, we must do it, absolutely.
RBH
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