Forgive the novella that follows...
(note that when I say "score" I do mean staves, notes, rests, etc.)
This is a truly interesting thread. And I think I've finally found a way to understand Evan's philosophy.
Don't shoot me, but I'm not even a film composer. I'm a concert music composer, who does a fair bit of contemporary dance music. I'm not opposed to composing for film, but I'm also not pursuing it with any serious energy. It just feels like a massive carreer undertaking, and I'm really not a musical "chameleon" -- I have my aesthetic, which I'm always trying to develop, but not a great deal of variety with regard to genre.
I use VSL to compose, plain and simple. I am, however, becoming increasingly interested in the possibilities offered by a type of music which is, in fact, _intended_ for CD, or recording—whose "home" is on the home stereo. This is an interest that has come about for two basic reasons: 1) I think the general movement of technologized culture is placing the locale for musical contemplation in the home—moving it away from the concert hall, and 2) today's sample libraries have come to the point where this sort of "venue" is feasible—virtual orchestras in virtual spaces. I'm interested in this, also, because it suggests a type of music which is completely "about" the composition itself, or more specifically, the imagination of the composer. Anyone who has written music intended solely for "live" performance knows that the ensemble has immense power in the realization of the composer's intentions. The same piece can sound bizarre played by one ensemble and fantastic played by another. This can simply be the result of poor musicianship, to be sure, but can also be the result of less drastic influences like interpretation, lack of rehearsal time (a _very_ common problem in the concert music world), or even the basic character of the performer. I had an instance of this when I wrote a concerto-like piece for piano and ensemble for a particualr pianist, only to have the performer leave town before the (somewhat delayed) premiere. The new pianist simply lacked the fire that the intended pianist had, and since the whole work was "hung" on the piano part (it _was_ a concerto, after all!), the performance just didn't "cut it". It wasn't _bad_, but it didn't quite sound like the piece I'd composed. How many of us have heard performances of music we wrote, or loved, absolutely slaughtered by a conductors with "different" understandings of the work?
On the one side, this is obviously a part of music-making, and of composing, since a piece of music composed for concert performance should be written with the psychology (and psychological variety) of performers in mind. However, the emergence of sample libraries of VSL quality has ushered-in a new ethics of composition, if you will, in which both the composition _and_ the performance are strictly controlled by the composer her/himself. And so, in my thinking of late, it seems to me that there are two different modes of composition which imply two different modes of thinking, even ethics, if you can accept the use of that term.
Ethic A, the traditionally supported one (and where I believe Evan spends most of his mental time), sees the score as dialogically tied to the "live" performance, in that musical meaning only truly exists in consideration of the physical parameters of live performance. So, each note on the page must be composed and realized as though it were for a live performance. This ethic literally sees the live performance as the "completion" of the score, since it is, in a certain sense, incomplete until performed. The midi realization is a surrogate performance, quite possibly of the highest quality and indiscernible from a potential live reading, but still a substitute from a semiotic standpoint.