[Dixielandjazz] Oboes, real and sampled (More OT than before ;-)

[David Richoux]

Bill's message about fake oboe concerts reminded me of something I read 
in a biography of Frank Zappa (I know, I know, not most of this list's 
"OKOM" ;-) and I just found this version of the story on the Internet.

Dave Richoux


clipped from http://users.cableaz.com/~lantz/pages/ocker.html

>  Art Jarvinen is a composer and percussionist and sometime music 
> copyist. He's also my friend and his company, Leisure Planet Music, 
> currently publishes my music. He's a member of a well-known new-music 
> ensemble called The California EAR Unit. He was one of Franks music 
> copyists - he worked on extracting orchestra parts and also doing 
> two-piano reductions of some of the large orchestra music. (His 
> reductions are available from Barfko-Swill.)
>
>  The EAR Unit plays a regular series of concerts at the Los Angeles 
> County Museum of Art -either part of the (unjustly) famous Monday 
> Evening Concerts or a separate series of EAR Unit concerts which had 
> sprung from their frequent Monday Evening performances. Sometime 
> around 1983 Art asked Frank if he would compose a piece for the Ear 
> Unit to perform at one of these concerts. Lots of groups were having 
> the same idea - the pieces for Kronos and the Aspen Wind Quintet were 
> happening about this time.
>
>  Frank was eager to use his new Synclavier to write the piece - and an 
> agreement was made and a date set. I don't believe the Ear Unit could 
> pay Frank anything for this, so Frank could do pretty much whatever he 
> wanted. Frank wanted to arrange his piece While You Were Out - a 
> transcribed Guitar Solo - he says that the Unit asked him for While 
> You Were Out, so that's probably true. (Steve Vai's original 
> transcription appears in the FZ Guitar Book.) This was when I was 
> working as a Synclavier assistant and part of my job was to work on 
> the computer files, entering and modifying them according to Franks 
> instructions.

>  The Monday Evening Concert Series at the County Museum is known 
> world-wide. It's decades old and has an exalted reputation in the 
> new-music world based on the participation of such luminaries as 
> Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Boulez. I've performed it many times. Seen 
> from close up, the programming is overly in-bred, academic, and 
> boring. To make matters worse the concerts are given in the Museum's 
> Bing Theater which has perfect acoustics for a movie theater - i.e. 
> deader than a door-nail - lousy for music. It seats about 600 - but a 
> MEC event rarely draws even 200. If it does, the regulars comment 
> about the "good attendance" without realizing how silly they're being. 
> If you look at the audience during a concert you'll see a lot of empty 
> seats. Frank wanted to check these concerts out - something about 
> checking the acoustics. So I accompanied him and (I think) Gail to a 
> typical event. He arrived late and wanted to sit in the very last row 
> because "there'd be less sound bouncing off the back wall". I remember 
> sitting with him in the Museum's cafeteria during intermission. He was 
> doing a good job of ignoring everyone - and the audience was doing a 
> good job of ignoring Frank. I doubt Frank really learned anything 
> useful about the acoustics -he probably learned a lot more about the 
> Monday Evening Concerts. It didn't take long before it became clear 
> that While You Were Art was going to be very difficult and that there 
> was not going to be enough time for the players to learn the piece and 
> be able to give it a decent performance. Frank's solution to this was 
> to have the players pretend to play their parts while the Synclavier 
> output was played on a PA system. This was before Milli-Vanilli, but 
> the concept of a band miming to pre-recordings was well known. It was 
> not unusual for there to be an amplified piece on an EAR Unit concert. 
> The tape would be recorded on a video cassette in utmost digital high 
> fidelity using the F-1 format. According to Frank's wishes the miming 
> was to be a secret - the ensemble was to make every effort to make the 
> performance look as though they were actually performing.
>
>  The instrumentation was close to this: flute, clarinet, violin, 
> cello, multiple keyboards and percussion.
>
>
>  Each part was developed as a separate Synclavier track. The music was 
> printed out for each player and a special analog cassette was recorded 
> for them to practice along with. One side of the cassette had the 
> final piece - as it was to be performed - and the other side had a 
> practice recording with that players part brought forward in the mix. 
> This was to make it easier to learn. One of the contributing factors 
> to the difficulty of the learning the piece was the Synclavier's 
> music-printing capabilities - which were (uh) "limited".
>
>  Finally a master tape to be used in performance was recorded on video 
> cassette. A good deal of effort went into making this tape - and Frank 
> and Bob Stone wanted to know what format the tape should be - Beta or 
> VHS? After considerable checking with the members of the ensemble Art 
> returned with the answer "Beta" - I remember that it was difficult to 
> get a beta-max video recorder installed in Frank's studio for this 
> purpose.
>
>  Frank chose not to attend the concert. No one in the (sparsely 
> attended) hall knew of the deception - except me and a few close 
> friends of members of the Unit. A lot of useless electronic equipment 
> was brought on stage for the performance, keyboards were conveniently 
> turned so that the players hands were not visible from the audience. 
> Microphones(non-functional, of course) were everywhere. The players 
> who knew their parts best were placed forward on stage. Art himself, 
> who had learned his part on Marimba well enough that he could have 
> actually played it, was front and center. Unlike a clarinet or flute, 
> it's almost impossible to fake playing a marimba so he created some 
> special mallets with huge puffy heads on them allowing him to actually 
> hit the bars and make an insignificant sound.
>
>  As soon as they turned on the sound system I knew there was a 
> problem. I described it as "a wall of hiss" and when the tape started 
> to play it was instantly clear that the sound was coming from one of 
> the practice cassettes, not off the digital beta-max tape. I slunk 
> down in my seat, I was sure that every one in the audience would 
> instantly know what was going on. I mentally prepared myself for a 
> disaster. Of course you must remember that I'd heard this exact same 
> tape countless times in Frank's studio where the sound quality was the 
> best. Even so, the sound in the Bing Theater that night can only be 
> described as "wretched". Much to my surprise the audience sat quietly 
> throughout. And there was polite and extremely unenthusiastic applause 
> afterwards. The Unit trudged out for an bow and then went right onto 
> the next piece.
>
>  After the concert I went on-stage to talk to Art. He was standing in 
> a small group - one of whom was the composer Morton Subotnick - a 
> former teacher of mine whose music is frequently performed by the EAR 
> Unit. I told Art "It sounded Awful!" Bad-mouthing a performance 
> directly like that is a "no-no" in the chamber music world and this 
> comment was greeted with some surprise. When it was explained that the 
> "awful" comment referred to the quality of tape-reproduction, it 
> became immediately clear that the audience had not understood the 
> pantomime quality of the performance.
>


> On Feb 12, 2005, at 10:32 AM, Bill Gunter wrote:
>
>> Listmates,
>>
>> Need oboes? Can't find an oboe player? No problem . . . just midi 'em 
>> up from a keyboard. Sampled sounds are getting more and more lifelike 
>> and to my ears the oboe is one of the cleanest midi sounds around.
>>