I've definitely given this some consideration. In fact, I started to sign up on SMP but got sidetracked. It would require some self-promotion but if you had a really hot VSL realization of the chart it would help; just find ways to get it in front of people who might want to play it with their groups.

Yes that is the trick getting things seen by the right people. I have been putting some things on SMP all with VSL demos, but one has to promote it.

Anyway I have had the same experience that Dave discussed with live performances vs. sampled and had the same reaction, feeling that the ideas in the music were just not there to the extent that it influenced my judgement of the music. When I heard on several occasions the same music that had been played live played with VSL it was amazing to hear all the ideas that were actually there, contrary to what the live performance made me think.

William,

I've been enjoying your pieces on SMP. In particular, the art song settings of those 19th century poems. Just exquisite! I think my favorite is Prospice. The way the music compliments the text...I was ever a fighter, so one fight more, the best and the last!...wow. Interesting that you sell the charts as vocal with piano accompaniment but the samples have big, beautifully rendered orchestral back ups. Listening to them gave me a kind of revelation and focus about Dave's original question on this thread. These tracks don't sound like a top soloist and orchestra in a nice concert hall recorded with a fine stereo mic about 15 rows back, center. Actually, they sound much better.

Yes, you read that correctly. The fact is, a recording is a recording and a live performance is a live performance. Our expectations are different, listening as we do to the fruits of over a century of technical advancements in the recording arts. We are used to full, rich chords in the brass that don't overwhelm delicate arpeggios in the harp. And vocalists who aren't forced to go with a weirdly affected style of singing to get over it all. At the Met, it's astonishing that a single singer can stand in the middle of that giant stage and hit the back of the house while completely blowing away a huge post-Romantic orchestra. But on a recording, that style of singing is really an acquired taste. Bing Crosby realized that he didn't need to blast like Al Jolson, he could sing musically into a microphone over the biggest arrangement. If you had been obsessed with making this recording "real", your vocalist would have had to crank up the horsepower to get over the lush orchestration, the brass and percussion would be staring at the conductor's scowls with every entrance, and the final effect would not have been as sonically beautiful or musical as what you and your singer achieved here.

Which brings us back to Dave's trio. The live version was actually very good. But as a recording, I don't think it stood a chance against Dave's carefully crafted virtual version. The trio's performance was aimed at the audience sitting in the room that night; the recording was just an archive. The intonation issues, loss of clarity on some figures...all that flashed by in an instant in the live setting, and I'm sure the crowd, unfamiliar with the piece, was left with a very positive experience. But Dave's virtual recording was created to be a permanent work of art, able to stand up to repeated, critical listening. As a recording, it is the superior musical creation.

I hope someday again to hear living musicians perform something I have written for an appreciative audience. But I understand that I will be far more likely to perfectly re-create the vision I have in my head with the tools of virtual orchestration. I look forward to that day and will closely follow your work and the developments at VSL until then.

Tom thanks very much!  What you said about a conductor trying to control the balance was exactly what happened at a live performance of Earth and Paradise - it was almost impossible to balance one singer against the orchestra even though it was a chamber orchestra. Whenever the music was marked forte or fortissimo the orchestra had to play "as if" they were fortissimo but not really.   

Sorry Dave to divert from your thread!  On this trio,  I think you express it exactly right concerning the recording vs. live.    

Hi Tom,

I read your post above to my wife, Becky, and watched as she nodded in complete agreement with everything you said.  Your observations of William's music are spot on, as he has shown that a committment to mastering the great resources, such as VSL's virtual samples, can enable a composer to realize their vision with minimal compromise.  As he stated to me recently, it really is about embracing the best of live and virtual performances, and not limiting oneself to either or.

To offer one final point on the live vs. virtual debate:  I was surfing through my weekly grocery flyer, and the company has a line of produce marketed under the name "naturally imperfect" in response to those wishing to consume produce free from pesticides, but not from blemishes.  I felt this is a perfect example of comparing virtual samples to live human expression.  The blemishes/bruises/abnormal shape of the produce might signify nature's beautiful creation, and might be preferrable to the "perfect looking apple", especially if the price to pay for said apple is pesticides used in the preservation of that apple.  However, if your produce's blemishes start overtaking the fruit, to the point where every bite contains mushy, bruised flesh, or to where the apple barely even resembles the look of one, some people might be put off by that fruit and return to the perfect looking (sprayed) apples.

Essentially, I would prefer a live performance if it was a convincing, polished, well rehearsed execution of the piece, true to my vision, or an alternate interpretation that is equally valid and/or better than my own.  If the execution is tainted with so many imperfections as to make it virtually indistinguishable from the actual piece, I'd rather have the midi rendition.  I also feel that, if as a listener, you're only focussed on one or more elements of the performance that are most significant to you (such as your desire to hear the rich, timbral characteristics of the instrument, overtones and all) you might always prefer a live instrument, because you're isolating only that one factor.  To me though, a beautiful red car gleaming in the sunlight is worthless if there's no engine under the hood, or the seats are painfully uncomfortable, or there's no adequate storage space, etc.  The beauty lies in the whole, not just one aspect of the car (or the produce, or the midi mockup).  Ok, I've beaten metaphors to death, so I'll stop now :)

Cheers!

Dave

Dave,

You wrote:

"I read your post above to my wife, Becky, and watched as she nodded in complete agreement with everything you said."

Becky is obviously a woman of superior intelligence and highly refined musical sensibilities and understanding. You are a lucky man.

Also:

"Ok, I've beaten metaphors to death, so I'll stop now :)"

Actually, I kinda dug that. I never thought of musical performance in terms of its similarity to misshapen produce---although I'll admit to having been in a few performances where I expected some to come flying at me at any moment!

My apologies for running your clearly focused thread down a tangential rabbit hole (how's that for mixing metaphors!), but I'd like to ask your opinion of something that I have wondered about for years:

When I was a kid putting together my collection of essential orchestral LPs, one of my first purchases was The Planets, a fairly new (at that time) recording by the LA Phil with Zubin Mehta, IIRC. SInce then, I have heard many renditions of this chestnut, but none quite like that LP. I realize now that they must have employed some of the production methods of Hollywood sound tracks, for which, again to the best of my recollection, they were roundly criticised. All I know is that every version I've heard since has left me a little flat. That agitated 16th-note thing in the violins and woodwinds while the brass and percussion are on a sustained note crescendoing to fff near the end of Mars...on this record you could by-God hear it; on every other version it's blurred in the first few bars and inaudible in the rest. That spot in Uranus where the whole orchestra honks out the 4-note theme in unison and then the low stuff comes thundering in...on my record there was abso-freaking-lutely NO DOUBT that a pipe organ had joined the party! Turn it up to 11 (as I was wont to do) and you could feel it in your guts. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.* Well, time went on and I learned the error of my ways. That over-the-top sweetening was gauche and inappropriate. The best orchestral recording is the most accurate one. The composer's original intention...etc, etc, blah, blah, blah. But I can't get over my immature thinking that my old record was the way The Planets was supposed to sound. I mean, what did the Chorale Symphony sound like to Beethoven? Do you think he heard hand horns (the axe of his day) playing every note out of the overtone series stopped or half-stopped? Or did he hear Epic Horns? Did he hear the spindly piano of his day playing the Emperor Concerto or did it sound in his head like a 9-foot Steinway? (Or something even more powerful?) What do you, as a composer, think?

Tom

*Disclaimer: Although this story is true to the best of my recollection, it may well be that every detail I have included is utter balderdash. This was a long time ago. It does, however, illustrate what I'm asking, whether it is a product of my addled brain or based in some way on reality. TC

That is interesting and sounds very familiar.  I had two favorite recordings of the Planets - Bernard Herrmann's very different conducting on a London FFRR (Full Frequency Range Recording) LP and William Steinberg's Boston Symphony recording.  I liked Herrmann's because being the great composer he was, he brought out every nuance of orchestrational detail even though his tempi were very slow.  Steingberg's because he had an uber-macho Mars.

btw listen to my demo of Mars here - I tried to bring out that shuddering string figure at the end.  

But anyway what you are talking about reminds me of my own reactions to particular recordings -  Rite of Spring by Zubin Mehta and the LA.  It was incredibly powerful and "muscular" if that term can be used.  Another definitive recording Mehta did was of Bruckner's 9th with the Vienna Phil-  that is so great I can't describe it - it is like something supernatural happened and the music went beyond this earth.  I heard that on that particular recording which was one he did in his younger days he was absolutely brutal to the orchestra.  But they accomplished something tremendous.   It is funny how one remembers certain recordings like that - another, by Stokowski, also on London Records, of the Firebird, in which all the players just seem to meld into one entity of ferocious power.  It is an amazing recording and and had an effect on me like what you are talking about - nothing else really does the music... 

I think there are interpretations of some of these classics that just strike you the right way, and it's different for different people. For me, almost anything I ever heard Leonard Bernstein conduct sounds better than any other take on it I've heard (but especially Firebird, the Rite, and Till Eulenspiegel). Ein Heldeleben...Benard Haitink. Ives' 4th...Michael Tilson Thomas. There's an old Reiner/Chicago take on Scheherazade that seems impossible (mostly thanks to Bud Herseth). Sometimes, it's not anyone's particular interpretation, it's the tune itself...I simply cannot listen to The Art of the Fugue; I am not worthy. By the time it gets to Contrapunctus XV, I am completely overwhelmed and have to run.

Interestingly, my Mehta Planets is musically not my favorite. That honor goes to an old Adrian Boult and one of the London orchestras. But it was the almost cinematic sound of the Mehta that made my hair stand on end. Does that mean I want to hear Heldenleben recorded, mixed, and mastered like a Star Wars soundtrack? Probably not, although it might be cool for Ives. What it means is that, when I get my VSL kit together, I think I'll make my choices based on what sounds good to me. It will be my music so that's OK. I can't see much point in redoing classical masterworks (the exception, of course, being their use as demo tracks for VSL) where the taste of such an approach would be questionable. Most of these standards have a plethora of available recordings anyway. No, the whole point for me of getting into virtual composition is to make myself happy and share that with a few others. I look forward to it.

BTW, I checked out your Mars. I can now unequivocally say that I have heard two versions where that string/woodwind freakout at the end comes through loud and clear. Bravo! I'll un-highjack Dave's thread now that I've run it off the rails. I wish both of you guys all the best.

Tom