Thanks, William, for the kind words. I'm happy to be part of the forum and the always interesting discussions.
You make a great point on how lucky we are to have the tools at our disposal to realize authentic performances of our music immediately after writing it. Further, in spite of the fact that most trained musicians should be able to hear a piece in their heads from examining a score, much like many other skills that have dissipated with time due to the advent of new technology, I find that the virtual performances (in conjunction with the score) get musicians far more excited than simply imagining what it might sound like. Of course, there's also a fine line that must be walked in terms of the midi production: too rudimentary (as in, old school, plunky general midi sounds with no musical shaping at all) and those musicians are immediately turned off and won't even attempt to imagine how the music might sound performed live...too good (as in your productions, William) and many musicians might be intimidated to perform the music, feeling like they won't be able to outdo what they heard.
Paul, thank you also for sharing your experiences with church music arrangements. There were a couple of telling points there, especially how the music director wouldn't program any of your original music, favouring instead, known arrangements. This is literally everyone's story when trying to get their own creative work heard. You'll find endless advice on how to market your original work by first doing covers/arrangements. Heck, I know it first hand as well...from several of my Acclarion duo's CDs, the works that bring in all the royalties for me are my arrangements of "That's Amore", "Flight of the Funky Bee", "Nessun Dorma" and several others. I think, by definition, a living composer's music cannot possibly be accepted until after death, as William even mentioned with the Schubert Symphony. :)
One final point you made that was quite thought-provoking: writing music that's easily executable by musicians. There is definitely merit to that, although, I think that the desire to be challenged technically with difficult music (that is still idiomatic/playable, but nonetheless has a high degree of difficulty) lies in the individual performer's personality/skill. As a performer, I often enjoyed music that at first, appeared beyond my technical abilities, but because I enjoyed the sound of it, and because I could sense the composer had attempted to write idiomatically for my instrument, I learned it. Other times, I would be presented pieces that I just knew the composer had little/no understanding of the idiosyncracies of the accordion and would write passages so nonsensical that I tuned out/went through the motions, as you mentioned.
Composers need to find the balance between writing notes that fulfill the goals of the music, without the need for excess. If the piece is meant to be a display of technical prowess and wizardry, so be it. If the piece needs blazing 32nd note passages with intervalic leaps that leave the performer feeling like they'll fall flat on their face, so be it...as long as the composer realizes they'll limit their pool of potential performers. That said, one thing I've always been personally against, is the over-reliance on polyrhythms that not even a mathematician could solve. I've played new music where the composer was writing endless 9 against 16, 32nd note sextuplets with rests on the 4th and 6th tuplet, a 3 minute piece with 42 time signature changes, ties that floated over bar lines and landed on a dotted 64th note...you know, stuff that looks like you took a sequenced performance, didn't quantize it, and exported the midi data to a score file :)
Cheers,
Dave
