@William said:

Everything is played easily. There is no indication of the lungs and muscles that are needed to perform this difficult orchestral showpiece. The notes and articulations are there, down to the last detail, but the coarse, powerful emotion of this piece is missing.

[:D] This is one of the funniest things that I've read about this mockup. Although it isn't meant to be, it's actually a back-handed compliment. Some of the passages were incredibly hard to play in and yet I've made it sound too easy! [:D] I know exactly what you mean William about certain mockups sounding too perfect, but I disagree with you here. I think it's a piece that everyone feels very close to and therefore if it doesn't comply with the listener's familiar interpretation, then it's in danger of not working musically for them. In fairness, I'd probably react to it in a simlar fashion [8-)] .

The great thing that the Holst mockup has is homogeneity. To me the Debussy sounds sonically all over the place. I'm always amazed by the 'as one' sound that an orchestra can create and only using VSL helped to create that.

The piece took about 18 days to mockup - it was very tricky and probably explains why I'm a bit more protective over this one [H] .

Andy.

Andy,

I have enormous respect for what you've done - you are a genuine master of MIDI performance as Herb pointed out.

Also, I didn't mean it was easy to do. I've done too many orchestral things with samples to ever think that. I know this was an incredible amount of difficult work.

I meant it sounds like every instrument plays easily. Having played horn in several performances of this, I know it is definitely NOT the case. This is a difficult piece to play, and that is what I was referring to.

I totally disagree with your comparison of this and the Debussy. And I feel this is the whole problem with Jupiter - that view of yours. It MUST be all over the place. If you took a recording by the New York Philharmonic, and could magically convert all the individual parts, exactly as they were played, to unquantized MIDI - you would be disgusted at how much they were "all over the place." That is the naturalness of musical performance. It is "all over the place" at certain points, and exactly on the spot at others.

You captured that beautifully in the Debussy. You will notice I had nothing but nearly raving praise for that performance - so don't be offended. Also I know my criticisms are very lacking in specifics and the reason is to accomplish what I'm talking about is the hardest thing of all to do with MIDI. It cannot be formulated. It is just musical performance which is sometimes expressive, sometimes not.

However I hope you realize the only reason I make this criticism at all is because of how good what you've done is. I don't care enough with most MIDI performances, but yours are brilliant, and demand more criticial attention.

Thanks William. I used the word sonically when talking about the Debussy being 'all over the place'. I didn't explain it very well. What I meant was that, to me, the fushion of the different libraries either doesn't work as well, or that I didn't get them to blend very well.

Anyway no offence was ever taken [:D] .

Thanks,

Andy.

That is very interesting to me though - I remember now how I was shocked at the fact you used single note samples from other libraries, and the performances of the VSL. You may not accept this, but I seriously wonder if that is one of the reasons I like the sound of that Debussy so much - it has a richness and actual lack of fusion that comes from the actual clash of different library recordings. Of course that is a HIGHLY debateable suggestion, and Im not too serious in suggesting it. But I wonder about it...

This reminds me (oddly enough) of one reason I think the Lord of the Rings films were so good. They are not seamless and perfect examples of one technique. They blended almost every technique ever learned in the history of cinema - not just CGI, but real miniatures and props as well. Not just digital video, but composting onto 35mm photographic film, etc., etc. A rich and fruitful blend of so many different mediums.

How did I ever get off on that topic - sorry!

I think it´s a very interesting thought.

After hearing Andy's Debussy I bought the Solo Strings. With that and the Xsample, etc. I started doing just that kind of compositing for each part and it's very effective for that slightly unblended texture (or blended depending on how you do it). I credit Andy for demostrating that they could work together so well. Hey, I can get that much more milage out of my sample library!

Clark

Hi,Andy.When I met up with Paul R a few weeks ago,he told me about your Debussy interpretation,and how it caused great and favourable rumbles.For some reason,I didn't get around to hearing it until just now,when he e-mailed me about your new Holst performance. Just heard them both through my office G3's mono speaker:a litmus test it ever there was.

To me the Debussy was astonishing and almost completely convincing:particularly impressive were the string articulations,which are easily the most difficult thing to pull off.The Holst fell short of that:I felt the strings were not so good,and the overall feel was too perfect somehow.It's STILL excellent,mind,but the Debussy was something quite special to me.Odd I'd have thought the reverse would have been the case,what with "Jeux" being so rhapsodic and,relatively,modern.

I think it also shows that we have very healthy high standards!I know you don't want to be drawn into a comparison,and that you're going to be protective over your babies,so forgive the inevitable A/B's that will surely be made.It's still a fantastic effort! Well done. [:D]

This is interesting, how things have developed into a comparison between AB's Debussy and Holst -- sounds like we're talking about a conductor now!

I haven't heard the Debussy for a long time, and I remember being very impressed, but I can't imagine the Holst is too far off the mark. The thing to me is that there's a lot more "looseness" to the Debussy *on paper*. He just has a more "rubato" way of composing music. Holst, on the other hand, is quite on-the-numbers, and his music is more "squared-off". If Debussy's is like a flower, a root or a vein, Holst's is like a snowflake or a diamond. Both are beautiful, but for very different reasons. To be honest, I think that makes the Holst much more difficult to capture in MIDI, and to give a sort of "respiration". Debussy has that, even on the printed page, but I don't really think the Holst has... Many may disagree, but I think this is actually why I really liked the Holst mock-up -- it maintained a certain squareness and angularity, a certain "perfection". Do you look out over an expanse of wilderness and think "perfection", or do you find that only in a Royal Garden? Obviously, both are perfect, but totally unalike.

It reminds me of the first time I heard Stravinsky's own performance of Le Sacre. I was so accustomed to the generally romantic interpretations out there that I was quite shocked to hear such a "brittle" sounding performance. But I recognized instantly that it "fit" better within his life's work. Suddenly the whole continuum, from "Russian" through to serial, made more sense to me. This why I found myself enjoying the Holst as a new interpretation of a much-interpreted work, not just a great MIDI mock-up. To me, it was very "Holst".

cheers,

J.

Not to be argumentative [[;)]] but I too have heard Stravinski's conducting of the Rite.

It is undoubtedly the absolute worst available on CD or even LP. In fact, he could not conduct worth a shit. A feeble, lackluster performance with absolutely no communication with the orchestra. The weakest I've heard, having none of the power of his original ideas as realized by other conductors - even minor ones - for decades. I find it funny how you equate the more powerful performances with "Romantic." In other words, we could extrapolate - if one is weak and limpwristed one is modern.

Stavinsky's conducting is a beautiful example of the vast gulf between musical imagination and musical realization or communication. There is no necessary relationship whatever. How many people have foundered upon the rock of believing that having an idea is the same thing as realizing it!

Mr.William:never heard of you.But you are correct,my "interpretation of Le Sacre" was,in hindsight,less than satisfactory.Downright pedestrian;sluggish even.Nothing makes my hair stand on end more than Boulez' or Berntstein's rampant visions. Well put,Sir.

JBM:I disagree that Jupiter would be more of a challenge than Jeux.I maintain it's all about getting the strings right and, from what I understand,Andy's string articulations were not all VSL derived.It's relatively easy to achieve realism with brass and woodwind:the attack transients of these instruments (even in ensembles) are less complex than the strings.There were many more articulation problems in the Debussy:the Holst string parts weren't that crazy.There's a brief section in Jeux where the violins are playing extremely rapid scalic figures,almost sounding like seagulls.I eagerly anticipated that passage on Andy's version,thinking "He'll never do it,he'll never do it." But he DID!Amazing


Anyway,that's my take on it.Nevertheless ,the Holst is still very accomplished.I'm still not achieving the realism I expected with the repetition tool.The Legato is very successful,however.

PS:I wish you Westerners would spell my name correctly. [6]

@strawinsky said:

I disagree that Jupiter would be more of a challenge than Jeux.

There's a brief section in Jeux where the violins are playing extremely rapid scalic figures,almost sounding like seagulls.I eagerly anticipated that passage on Andy's version,thinking "He'll never do it,he'll never do it." But he DID!Amazing

Hi Strawinsky,

When Herb asked me to do the Holst, I thought it would be a breeze compared with the Debussy. It wasn't [*-)] . It took me nearly twice as long. The Debussy was easier because of the Legato Tool - it's as simple as that. The seagulls you spoke about worked exclusively because of the solo violin and vln ens Perf-leg samples. I used nothing else for those and it was a very pleasant surprise that they worked so well. [:D]

As I mentioned before, the Holst is marked Non-Legato throughout the piece - when I first saw this I realised that it wouldn't be able to rely on the exclusive tools of VSL. In some repects a lot of it could be achieved to a lesser degree with one of the Old School libraries such as Miroslav, but here's the difference between the Cube and Miroslav, or even any other traditionally sampled library around today - CHOICE OF ARTICULATIONS. This has been a big revelation for me doing this mockup. I set up each Cube instrument so that I had a large number of articulations mapped to key switch groups. So during a performance I was able to try out different combinations with different notes within a phrase. It was the sheer number of options available that made a lot of the mockup possible. As the work progressed I began to gain confindence that no matter what was thrown at VSL, it would give me the correct articulation or combination of articulations to realise the phrase.

Andy.

Gosh Mr. Stravinski I'm awful sorry.

Hey wait a minue! Aren't you dead?

William,

If you look again, you'll see that I never said the Stravinsky Rite was "good", I said that it gave a completely different take on the piece, particularly in relation to his other works. This is actually the big issue, isn't it...? You're talking about a good or bad performance in a very general way, in my opinion. For me, a good performance is not necessarily one which makes everyone sound lovely, it's one that captures the essense of the composition. In this sense the Strawinsky(!)/Craft recordings are invaluable -- yes, there are many more "beautiful" recordings, or more "powerful" recordings, but none of them capture that strangely brittle, percussive aspect of his works. It's almost as though he imagined *every* section of instruments as some unusual sort of percussion -- at least in the big tuttis... And it changes the sound of the orchestration quite dramatically. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ending of his Firebird recording, where we *finally* hear all those big chords heavily accented, as their intended! The result is a completely different colour, with a curiously different blending of instuments. Whether "good" or "bad" is beside the point -- this was the way it was intended to sound, and I wish some more competent conductors would play it as it's written. Of course, the orchestra is falling apart all over the place... But Strawinsky wasn't a conductor. No argument there.

As far as the use of the word "romantic" goes, with reference to performances of StravavaWinsky, that is not my word. It was Stravinsky who generally made use of this term, so I should probably have used quotes. Basically, it's referring to a whole generation of conductors who became famous conducting Romantic works, and often failed to see the need for a different approach to any other type of music. These same conductors were also sharply criticized in the 80s and 90s, when "period instruments" became the big craze, for conducting Bach in the style of Mahler. That's all I'm talking about. Think of the difference between a "Karajan Mozart" and a "Harnoncourt Mozart"... Obviously, there's no "better" or "worse" reading, they're just different, and quite dramatically so. And you should know by now that I don't give a shit about "modern" or "romantic", so please let it rest. Particularly when it comes to equating "modern" with some perceived personality defect... Actually, I've generally suffered at the hands of performers who failed to see that my rhythmic writing is not, in fact, "modern", but rather (if I must use a period) more impressionistic. New music players tend to strive for an absolute rhythmic precision, which generally causes my music to sound much more angular and chaotic than it actually is... If you've ever sat in the audience and heard your music innocently slaughtered, by perfectly capable musicians who simply didn't know how it should sound (and how could they?), then you understand why I find the Stravinsky/Craft recordings invaluable. This actually relates to another thread (the one about "doing mock-ups at all" where I mention performance tradition), and the understanding of a composer's language... But that's another discussion.

Since we're talking about you, Mr. Strawinsky, I think Andy himself highlights the difference, in a very practical way, by mentioning the limited use of the performance tool in the Holst. I wouldn't necessarily say it's only that, but that certainly makes the difference clear. My experience has been that rhythmic complexity, speed, and a more off-the-beat style make midi breathe (while often making live performance, by all but the greatest musicians, 'congested'), and that rhythmic unison, non-legato writing, and slower passages are comparatively more difficult to realize with midi.

J.

Thanks,Andy for your enlightening response to my post.I bet you jumped up and down for joy when the seagulls section came out the way it did.Marvellous!I think the key to what you described is the non-legato(detache) nature of the Holst vs. the liquid strings of Jeux.So far ,at least to my ears,the legato articulations are more successful than the repetition tool at getting a natural attack.I've not been satisfied with my efforts,at any rate,and I'm not sure that I'm doing anything particularly wrong.The legati phrases,on the other hand,seem to flow along very convincingly.

Thanks for sharing some of your work methods.

Hi,JBM.See,I think good or bad is the whole point:from a completely objective point of view,that's how I would define whether I liked a piece (or version) or loathed it.One can dryly dissect a work,and historicize in a clinical and academic way,but if it don't rock ma world it's baaad.And I think Igor's version of his own piece was just that.Sure it was interesting to hear,and I've heard him conduct other pieces which I did favour.But the brutal nature of the Rite didn't come over to me.It was too considered,which came as a great surprise,consider that the man was known for his outburts,as well as his surgically dispassion.Therien lies the answer,I guess.

I definitely agree with your parting appraisal,though,as a general.

William:I'm not really him,y'know...

JBM

I'm certainly not going to argue since it's a matter of personal likes and dislikes but my point is that this so-called "brittle" approach is not quintessential to this music. The percussive, rhythmic aspect demands a conductor like Mehta, Bernstein, Solti, etc. - who bring out the "power" which is essentially just the rhythm but played very, very well and forcefully. This piece is an attempt at capturing the mind and universe of a very Romantic conception of the "Primitive Savage." To do that the music must be performed and conducted at the highest level of skill and inspiration, with full communication between conductor and orchestra, not dryly and mechanically and rather lifelessly as Stravinksy conducted. Ironically, the music is in glaring opposition to his conducting - he wanted a picture of life at its most primal and free, not at its most strangled and intellectualized - which is how he conducted.

Igor, [;)]

I agree. I was merely pointing out the fact that *my original comment* had nothing to do with good or bad. From a subjective point of view, all that really matters is whether you like it or not. That's a given. But as composers we are constantly faced with the issue of whether our work is being performed in a way that does the score, and the musical idea in general, justice. If it's NOT, then our audience might walk away saying "bad", when they could well be saying "good", had the performance hit the mark.

Now, it's very likely that Stravisnky didn't do his work justice when he recorded it, but there are certain aspects of *interpretation* that are undeniable. It is not a question of his musicianship as a conductor, but rather of his interpretive authority as the composer to do things in quite a different way. He did that with most of his recordings, and that is what makes them valuable -- they aren't just "bad" performances, they are unique and very personal performances, which communicate very important aspects of how he heard the orchestra.

So I'm not talking about "dry" dissection. There's nothing "academic" about it. I'm a composer, and it matters to me that my music is played the way it is intended to be played -- and in this case I don't mean "well" or "poorly", but rather with the correct understanding of how the music works, how it functions. The musical score is generally not too good at communicating this -- indeed, a big part of the learning curve for a composer is learning how to manipulate the score into saying what the composer intends. The case of Stravinsky's own recordings of his works is important for these reasons, and for these reasons alone. Which is why I say it matters little whether the conducting is good or bad.

Anyway, I think we understand one another.

cheers,

J.

Talking about the "Rite" and Bernstein I just want to throw in how amazed I was hearing a recording of this combination. I don´t know which orchestra it was, but the rhythm was everything else than exact and brutal, it was a total mess and full of overbearing rubatos or tempo changes. I hated it.

A freind of mine once found a recording in the street by a completely unknown russian orchestra. It is AMAZING! I really love this. Totally sober in expression. Who wants a copy, just PM me.

Well put,Sir,and we might concur in a matter of some details,though I'm in agreement with William's closing paragraph of his,er,last post.There's a strange dichotomy in this wild,primitive music,and the detached,almost reluctant approach of its author.The Rite is a virtuoso score of the highest technical expression,demanding an extraordinary level of togetherness to convey the precise opposite.Namely,spontaneity and abandonment.I think all great music achieves this:the sense of it issueing from nothing in a kind of evolving creative process.But that requires great technical facility.Anyway,I digress.I just feel that IS's vision of his own piece was not,on this occasion, sympathethic to its spirit.However,his chamber and "atonal" works are ideally suited to this cool detachment.

I wasn't intending to aim the academic and dry at yourself:'twas merely a generalisation of a certain type of approach. [[;)]]

Main thing is,thank God for stimulating conversation and the VSL forum....

Actually you're right on that Mathis. I don't even remember Bernstein's. The one I remember most clearly was Mehta with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A great performance iin which the rhythm and energy was almost maniacal. But I have also noticed a couple recordings Bernstein did that had unwarranted tempo changes that did not improve things at all.

Though a few things from Bernstein are the greatest ever recorded - like his Shostakovich 5th. It cannot be surpassed, maybe not even equalled.

Stravinsky being human was better at some things than others. The great conductor/teacher Fritz Zweig (a friend and neighbor of I.S. in West Hollywood) once told me not to listen to any of the great composers works conducted by him as he was not a great conductor. My feeling is that Stravinsky did succeed in some of his recordings. His Rakes Progress is wonderfully realized and not shown up at all by Ricardo Chailly's more recent recording. I just heard some of his chamber sized pieces conducted by him and they are terrific. At the same time I'm not surprised he has some disasters out there because Zweig would never make a useless statement about anyone, much less a friend and even less a giant musical personality.

I digressed and humbly apologize. Just too darn interesting to ignore.

Dave Connor