Musicians are protesting the use of virtual orchestras on Broadway. Producers say the VO is a new instrument. Musicians disagree. “We think this machine is designed for the sole purpose of eliminating live music for the purpose of reaping profits. Their attempt to turn this machine, and I tell you that this is a machine, into an instrument is just another ploy. The synthesizer is a musical instrument played by a musician. A virtual orchestra machine is just that. I would not equate those two, ever.”
Tag: 03.25.04
Sadler’s Wells Chief Quits
Jean-Luc Choplin has suddenly left his controversial reign heading Sadler’s Wells. “One might have felt that Choplin had an unrealistic sense of what could be achieved at Sadler’s, but he was nothing if not ambitious, a man of big ideas. It would be a shame to lose his continental sensibility altogether.”
Not All Instruments Are Created Equal…
So what do musicians in other orchestras think of violinists in a German orchestra demanding more pay because they play more than other colleagues? “It’s a completely fatuous argument – and I’m not just saying that because I’m a piccolo player. That line of reasoning doesn’t apply in any other world. Certainly not in the sports world. In an American football team there’s a guy who just comes on to kick goals, and he works for maybe a total of one minute in the whole game, but he gets paid just as much as the rest of the team. Maybe even more, if he’s good.”
Epics On The Fringe
“Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted: by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt, the debased or diminished stature of modern humankind; by a sense that the world, to borrow a term from John Clute, the Canadian-born British critic of fantasy and science fiction, has ‘thinned.’ This sense of thinning—of there having passed a Golden Age, a Dreamtime, when animals spoke, magic worked, children honored their parents, and fish leapt filleted into the skillet—has haunted the telling of stories from the beginning.”