Orchestra Tech National Conference (review)

Over 75 composers, performers, researchers, and arts administrators gathered in New York, 10-14 October 2001, for the Orchestra Tech National Conference, a series of five concerts of chamber and orchestral music and nine panel discussions on a broad set of artistic, technological, and administrative themes. The concerts and panels took place at a number of locations around New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Carnegie Hall, and the Knitting Factory.

The conference was the inaugural event of the American Composers Orchestra's (ACO's) Orchestra Tech project (www.orchestratech.org), which is described as "a multi-year initiative to explore and encourage the integration of technology into the modern orchestra and to stimulate the development of new symphonic music using new media and digital technology." Tod Machover, composer and MIT Media Lab professor, leads the initiative in his role as the ACO's Music Technology Advisor.

One of the most enlightening—and sobering—moments of the conference was a presentation by Robert Sutherland, music librarian for the Metropolitan Opera. Mr. Sutherland began with a brief historical discussion of music printing since the founding of the Met, illustrating each "improvement" with sample parts from the Met's music library. With each advance in printing technology, the clarity and longevity of the music suffered: paper faded more quickly; beams became harder to distinguish and had to be darkened by hand; and note spacing became less logical and natural. Today, members of the Met Orchestra request to use the old handwritten parts whenever they are available, because they are in the best physical condition and are the easiest to read. After a melodramatic pause, Mr. Sutherland stated the obvious conclusion: "So far, technology has not done us well."

Mr. Sutherland's observation highlighted two recurring themes of the conference. First, orchestras are reluctant to incorporate technology into an ensemble that functions well without it. As one prominent orchestra administrator saw it: "Composers are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist." Second, the use of technology in an orchestral setting often introduces more problems—artistic, technical, financial, and logistic—than benefits.

These two themes served as a stark warning to anyone interested in uniting the orchestra with technology. Thus, the most interesting performances and panels at the conference were those which heeded this warning and proposed solutions, either through words or through music: compelling reasons for using technology in the orchestra, and practical techniques to address the challenges its use poses.

Many composers gave persuasive artistic reasons for the use of technology in a chamber music setting, both through their presentations and through performances of their music during the conference. Ricardo del Falla's Homotecia and James Mobberly's Soggiorno show how chamber and solo musicians, respectively, can bring a fixed tape accompaniment to life through skillfully composed interplay between live instruments and electronics. Robert Rowe, in a panel presentation, surveyed his use of intelligent machine listening in interactive works for soloist and computer: software reacts to performance gestures to create a true collaboration between human and machine. Randall Woolf's Hee Haw integrates looped samples of square-dance callers (triggered by keyboard players) with a chamber ensemble and two singers to create astonishing musical textures far greater than the sum of their parts. And Joshua Fineberg's Empreintes uses realtime analysis of each instrument in the ensemble to capture, analyze, modify, and emphasize different aspects of the performance, giving the computer the role of musical interpreter rather than performer: the machine serves as a prism through which the audience experiences the music.

Only a handful of composers, though, directly addressed the challenge of integrating technology into a large orchestral setting. Mr. Mach-over, whose new work Sparkler was premiered by the ACO at the final Carnegie Hall concert, uses realtime audio analysis of the entire orchestra to respond to the character of several aleatoric sections of his work. In his discussion of the piece, Mr. Machover was vague about what these characteristics were. He suggested that the software, developed by Tristan Jehan, senses general...