...I'm sorry I omitted you Alastair, please wade in if you're minded to.

Thanks Ron for uploading that example. It reminded me of a phenomenon I've noticed in the last few years among some composers (and I don't just mean students) who, after writing music directly into Sibelius or Finale and listening to the synthetic results, are disappointed when a real ensemble "fails" to play the music at the same speed with the same metronomic precision.

The issue with strings, especially solo strings, is principally one of articulation. There are almost infinite ways of getting from one note to the next, which are crucial indicators of emphasis and expressive shaping. (I don't say this isn't also true of other instruments but I think it's more important for bowed strings.) There may in the future be computer programmes able to discern which string, what fingering and which kind of bowing a human violinist might use for a given passage and apply these to the basic sounds, but until then sampled strings are going to go on sounding as stilted as in this example.

... which isn't of course to say I haven't started thinking about it yet. I've been given a strict list of all available instruments and doublings, which is somewhat different from the basically free rein I've had in such matters previously. For those who might be interested, the deal is 4444 6541 4perc timp pf hp strings. So I shall have to leave out saxophones for the first time, although there's some consolation in (this being a Bavarian orchestra) the availability of Wagner tubas, which were optional for the final passage (but not used by the BBC SO) in my previous effort. The timpani will be excluded as a matter of course because I don't really have any use for them. I've developed an interest in using the celesta, not having done so before, but I think it would have to be amplified. Apart from which, I have the feeling that some kind of "angle" will have to be found which gives the piece a characteristic sound, once I have more focus on the overall "tone of voice" of the work, and this angle could involve for example leaving out a whole group of instruments, since it can't depend on adding one. I'm beginning to "hear" the opening of the piece with some clarity, though this hasn't yet resolved itself into specific choices of instruments (or indeed specific pitches etc.), and when it does, of course, everything might change. But I have a few fairly extensive things to do first, so these ideas are presently  germinating in the background.

Sorry for all that irrelevant detail. I'd better get back to work.

I find that simultaneously interesting and provocative, as for me the celesta, like the harp, is one of those instruments which may not have the welly to ride a full orchestra yet nonetheless seems to be much louder than you'd think in a concert hall. I'm afraid poor old conventional Ron would probably have reinforced the celesta with a glock or two or gone down the synthesizer route, but bearing in mind a couple of recordings (particularly my least favourite) of DSCH 4 where the engineers have sought to give the celesta an unnaturally exaggerated presence, I can see how this might begin to create an a unique and interesting timbre.

Hope this hasn't affected your gestation period in any way, r.

I'm not sure whether to be greatly cheered or to go into cynical mode over this but it may perhaps give some succour to our struggling rumps?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6593341.stm

I think quite cheered, actually. It may be a bit tokenist compared with what could be done to revivify music in schools but the simple act of allowing every child to hear a crack orchestra at full pelt, in the flesh, at least once, does mean that everyone gets the chance to get hooked if they want to.

The UK is apparently going to be made the (not merely 'a') world centre for orchestral composition by 2017 so you had all better start stocking up with big manuscript paper before the price goes up.

To me, it's just a matter of recognising that the amount of "welly" or lack thereof has to be considered when deciding what else is going on when the harp, celesta, etc. is playing as part of an orchestral texture. The Shostakovich 4 example that you cite (I've always wanted to have a doorbell that does that!) is, of course, one where the celesta has a solo as distinct from merely being a part of the overall texture; there's absolutely no need for any engineering trickery here, for Shostakovich knew exactly what he was doing here, placing the celesta's repeated phrases against a soft string chord and (in the early stages) a quietly pulsating timp, so all that's necessary is that the conductor ensures that the dynamic of that long-held string chord is such as to let the celesta through.

As to the harp, some composers have sought to overcome the balance problem by using two and doubling some of the material, but this, to me, is both a cop-out and a waste of two harps that would be better employed playing different material from one another.

Best,

Alistair

There remain problems here if you do. Firstly, the works you list, whilst still 80 and more years old, don't go back a century except Schönberg's First Chamber Symphony, for which you give the wrong composition date of 1922 (it IS a century old). However, the Stravinsky, Bartók and Schönberg works you cite ar predominantly tonal, the Prokofiev is not far behind them in those stakes and only the Varèse could reasonably be described as "tonally challenged". You could instead perhaps have cited Schönberg's Five Orchestral Pieces as an example of less tonal orchestral music from almost a century ago. However, your point here seems to be that audiences shy away when the music is not predominantly tonal and that they've been doing this for around 100 years, whereas everything written earlier than that has absorbed into the world of general audience acceptability, largely by reason of being tonal. The problem with this kind of argument is that the tonal languages of more than a century ago were very different to the music written 300 years earlier, but if you go back that far, there was not a concert-going tradition, so it is not possible to make retrospectively applicable comments about audience acceptance, therefore a comparison (which might otherwise have been valuable) with the last century's problem (as you see it) is accordingly also impossible.

The fact that, in more recent times, more people have been driven away from "classical" music in general (which you accept is the case) is clearly down to a number of factors of which the languages of some composers - SOME, mark you, not all, by any means - is only one and it's not even one of the more significant ones.

But what did they mean by "too advanced"? As to "Mr Grew", who appears to profess to cite Brahms as the pinnacle of European musical composition rather than the great composer that he was, the "difficulties" that he professes to have with Shostakovich place him well into the minority (and I'm talking about what he claims to be able to grasp of his work, not whether or not it appeals to him).

All this talk of "advanced" music is largely of snobbish origin or due to laziness of mind and accordingly most unhelpful. Is a Ferneyhough score really more "advanced" than the St. Matthew Passion as far as the intelligent, unbiased and receptive listener in concerned? Let's face it, far more listeners are musically illiterate than musical literate (and by this I do not intend a pejorative meaning but to draw the distinction between listeners who can't read scores and those who can); apart from the question of unfamiliarity (and, of course, personal taste, which applies to all listening cases), what difference do the technical and linguistic characteristics found in, say, Varèse's Amériques or Stockhausen's Gruppen really make to a non-literate listener in terms of whether or not he/she can get something out of it? Yes, I do accept that there some music written in the last 40 years or more may have been written more for the cognoscenti than for the wider listening public but, again, I think that claims for the extent to which this has consciously been done have been somewhat exaggerated.

Apart from that use of the term "advanced", I think you're right about this - but what does it tell us about the situation? What would you conclude from that? That audiences need some kind of extra-musical diverson or accompaniment (cinematic or otherwise) to such scores in order to be able to accept them? If so, perhaps we've all now been alerted to a previously unsuspected motive behind the composition of Schönberg's Accompaniment to a(n Imaginary) Film Scene...

Best,

Alistair

Back to the celesta. I was intrigued to read that Richard's inerested in exploiting this rather wonderful instrument, if only because that's what I've tried to do, in a number of contexts and with different functions, in the piece I've just finished. (Well, it's not the only thing I've tried to do, but...). Does anyone else feel it's been somewhat under-utilised as an orchestral instrument? As for potential balance problems, these aren't too serious in the upper register - within reason - but far more dangerous in the lowest (bottom octave, sounding middle C upwards); but that's actually the register I like the most! Very striking, 'muffled', clunking metal sonority when played with any degree of force.

Which is why some engineers feel impelled to spotlight it so mercilessly. On recordings where there is a natural balance, the phrase grows stronger as it climbs, which I'm sure is the composer's intention: in at least one recording so much compensation for the imbalance between the lowest and highest notes of the phrase has been applied that the opposite of the case occurs, incidentally allowing the listener to experience all the clunky, rather weird toy-piano overtones which for all their interesting quality just sound horrendously out of place in the context of that Cmi chord.