So, with that said, I think maybe an aspect of what William getting at - or perhaps just the way I've been thinking along a similar line - is the idea of the samples somehow slipping from their ties to "real" orchestral instruments. At least, that's what I would think of when considering the idea of music composed specifically **for** Vienna Instruments, not composed for acoustic instruments, then translated into Vienna Instruments. Of course, as Mike mentions, analog and/or digital synthesis has become the foundation for a great deal of music that is only "at home" in a mediated form, as there is no "live" alternative available - no mimesis to be carried out... No "real" to emulate, other than the reality of the influence of electrical impulses on a speaker cone.
But the situation is more complicated for using Vienna Instruments as a sort of "native" medium. I think this is partly because it's very difficult to actually hear these "instruments" without reference to a model of the real. I mean, if we imagine the timbres we want for a synthesized piece, we may start with some example of another work we enjoyed, and try to figure out how the sound was produced - what synthesis technique was used - then make alterations to that sound, in order to make it our own. Or we might have some knowledge of the various synthesis techniques available, or maybe even specific plug-ins, and we may imagine new timbres that "should" be possible using those techniques, or plug-ins, and go about realizing them technically. These synths, and the sounds we've developed, then become our instruments, or our "palette". But with Vienna Instruments, at least for me, the reference point is always the "real" instrument. And that is the limitation. Of course, this is *my* limitation, but it's still a limitation, and it's difficult to get around.
Over the past year and a half, or so, I wrote an album based on this sort of investigation. Some of the stuff is posted here:
http://www.myspace.com/mrwheetuk
The last track is a remix I did for a friend of mine, so it's a little bit of an outsider, sonically speaking.
While I like what I came up with, and think it's quite a good album, it's not quite what I set out to do. The reason, basically, is that it's still much more thoroughly rooted in acoustic performance than I'd originally hoped it would be. I just kind of gravitated toward the idea of producing a sort of "virtual band", and really wrote the music for that band. In fact, I took it so far that even the synthesized parts are always written to be playable by one person, and are actually mixed using amp simulation! Crazy. But this is just something that kind of emerged during the process... And I think the reason it emerged in this way is that I was completely seduced by the realism of the Vienna Instruments, and could hardly resist producing a virtual band when working with them. Strange, but true.
Anyway, I have in mind a new album, with quite a different approach. I think, this time around, I'm going to program a sort of VI host which implements the VIs under a kind of synthesis paradigm. The idea will be to use the VIs as the basic "waveforms", but to house them in a MIDI program that mixes them, automates program changes, detunes, and so on, in a way that mimics different types of synthesis.... Could be interesting, could be a bloody mess. Who knows... Considering how long the first album took, it also may never happen! ;-)
But I also like William's idea of sort of "resurrecting" old orchestral pieces using the VIs. In fact, if I ever find the time, I'd like to program some of the orchestra pieces I wrote back in the 90's, when I was a wildly ambitious young autodidact, writing orchestral scores out by hand on, and packing them up in the closet once they were done!
J.