OPERA NEWS, March 2, 1996
The Money Pit
How did Kentucky Opera solve its rising-cost dilemma?
By substituting a synthesized orchestra for real musicians
by Charles H. ParsonsAt seven holiday performances of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel by Kentucky Opera, pickets greeted the audience outside the theater. Inside, general director Thomson Smillie greeted visiting dignitaries with his side of the conflict. Kentucky Opera was using a digitized computer orchestration in place of a live human orchestra -- and the result was a bitter clash between art and technology.
Cold logic, tinged with arrogance, seems to have guided management's decision. KO needed a surefire box-office draw, such as the local ballet's annual money making performances of The Nutcracker. So the company attempted to create a new Louisville holiday tradition with multiple performances of Humperdinck's opera.
Since the Louisville Ballet Nutcracker, already established, had preempted the Louisville Orchestra and KO's principal performance venue, Whitney Hall, other arrangements were necessary. Venue was no problem: the recently restored Palace Theater was large enough, close by and available. The orchestra problem was solved by importing Bianchi & Smith: Computerized Music for the Theater, a company experienced in theater technology, with more than 700 productions, many in Las Vegas and New York. This would be their first application of the technology to a mainstage production by an important professional opera company.
In 1989, Frederick Bianchi, director of computer music at the Collegep;Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati, first applied his technology to a practical situation. Student instrumentalists were largely unavailable to play for a CCM production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, in part because of faculty reluctance to allow students to play "pit orchestra." So a crude prototype of today's sophisticated technology was used instead. That production was filmed for television but remains unedited and has never been shown. Little did CCM faculty members realize how their attitude would propel the invention and development of a technology that threatens to supplant their own artistry and jobs.
Assisted by CCM graduate and former violinist David Smith, Bianchi subsequently has improved the quality of the technology. The two compiled a RAM-based (very fast memory) sample library of 160 megabytes of a full range of sounds produced by string, wind, brass and percussion players from the Prague Symphony Orchestra. Some sound effects were produced synthetically. In the orchestra pit at KO during Hansel and Gretel there was an array of mysterious equipment: two Macintosh computers with fifteen-inch monitors (plus one more for emergency backup), a large battery pack for power backup, a mixing console, samplers, amplifiers, two large speakers, plus two more large speakers outside the pit, all run by two technicians. In the center of the auditorium, several rows of seats had been partially removed to accommodate another bank of equipment to control dynamics, run by two more technicians, including Smith himself.
The conductor, Robin Stamper, seated at the podium, used his left hand to cue the singers, while his right hand, stoutly supported to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, operated a small keyboard (eight keys) to control tempo. A basic tempo could be established and run on "automatic pilot," or tempo could be adjusted by tapping with one finger. Stamper's piano-vocal score (not orchestral) had colorful cue markings for tempo adjustment.
Because his hands were kept occupied, the conductor's interpretive gestures toward the singers were limited to facial expressions and head-nodding. At the equipment in mid-audience sat Smith and a technician carefully controlling the dynamics of individual instrument groups within the orchestra computers and of the heavily miked singers. During the performance there was no communication between conductor and technicians. At this stage they had not even collaborated on rehearsing the dynamics.
What kind of sound comes out of those speakers? If I had heard this performance on the radio without explanation, I would have had difficulty telling what instruments were being used. Sometimes a decent clarinet sound emerged, some ratty trumpet sounds, but generally the sound alternated between an amorphous haze and a wheezing carousel colliding with a skating-rink mechanical organ. It was unpleasant and completely unmusical. The sounds were mechanical, insensitive, emotionless, inhuman. When I mentioned this to Smith, he responded that I should regard the computer as a new musical instrument producing its own sounds. But after the performance, Smith exhibited the instrument groups for "naturalness of sound" and fidelity to the composer. So which is it? Sure the echo effect ricocheted nicely and the crickets and cuckoos chirped in stereo. But so what? The musical experience just was not there.
Did KO management believe these sounds could be passed off as music -- or that the audience would accept or perhaps not even notice that there was no orchestra? If so, they underestimated their audience. Numerous negative comments were heard during the performance and at intermission. Six indignant patrons seated behind me stormed out, loudly protesting this "artistic farce." Perhaps KO is right in assuming that some of the audience, the younger and less musically experienced members in particular, have become aurally desensitized by the artificial technology of pop music. Yet if they (we) cannot experience a live orchestra in the theater, where else can we experience it? And what will become of those longtime supporters of the art who see that art bastardized? Must the arts lower their standards rather than raise those of their audience through education?
The information release from the Louisville Orchestra Musicians Association said: "Tonight you'll be seeing what the opera management is calling a 'techno-opera.' We say you'll be seeing an opera because this performance consists of singers on stage singing to music generated by a digital computer, a machine.... But you won't be hearing an orchestra.... You have paid full price for a diminished production that diminishes the arts in a city once defined by excellence. It is the grandeur of ... a live and highly sensitive combination of musical forces that defines opera. It is our contention that an opera becomes opera through the combination of all those musical forces, and that emphasizing one component ... at the expense of the others makes it something far less than what we cherish as opera. Remember, opera generates electricity, but electricity simply cannot generate opera."
The Louisville Orchestra already is in perilous financial condition, having to curtail its season from forty-five to forty weeks, with severe salary concessions by the musicians. Even the orchestra's function within the Louisville arts community is in question. The musicians' jobs are definitely at risk. KO claims that in this instance the Louisville Orchestra was unavailable. Are we to assume there are no more instrumental musicians in Louisville of sufficient artistic quality to form a pickup orchestra?
Humperdinck required as many as seventy-five orchestra musicians; Bianchi & Smith required only four technicians. Yet Bianchi & Smith say they are not putting musicians out of work! Smith claims that if a smaller orchestra is required, then a live orchestra should be used. But even now he is preparing a digital edition of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.
Optimism and expectation ran high at the KO offices, but in anticipation of criticism, Smillie wrote a "General Director's Rationale," which was distributed to the media: "Given the massive orchestral scale of Hansel, performances could not take place at all without digitization -- creating work for musicians." (Work for seven singers, yes, but not for the seventy-five members of the orchestra.) "The sound could fill a huge auditorium and play to much larger audiences." (This implies that a live orchestra could not fill the auditorium, yet the singers had to be miked to be heard over the computers in this relatively small venue.)
KO claimed the larger theater and comparatively low production expense would enable it to perform at lower prices than normal. Smith estimates a savings of at least half the costs of the orchestra by eliminating it. In this case, the participation of an orchestra would have cost $150,000 to $200,000 for the series, while computer costs were only $20,000. "Once capital costs are covered, pure profit will result -- over $100,000 in new business is expected -- to underwrite the rest of the season." (But only to the severe artistic detriment of the rest of the season.) "Artistically, all rehearsals can be done to orchestra accompaniment." (Eliminating rehearsal pianists.) "Voices and orchestra can be easily balanced." (Any decent conductor should be able to do that -- and if this is the case, why were the singers miked?)
The bottom line, of course, is financial. With federal arts funding on the wane, alternative means of support -- the main job of the board of directors -- and cost saving -- the job of management -- must be found. But must it be done at the expense of artistic integrity? Music is an art of communication. Even if the technology improves, and surely it will, an essential ingredient is missing: the vibrant interplay among human beings, an experience that cannot be duplicated by machine. Music is an ensemble effort in which artists are inspired by one another and the audience, creating that indefinable spark of artistic endeavor.
It is ironic that in this age that strives for artistic perfection, for the recreation of authentic period performance techniques and fidelity to the composer's intentions, we should experiment with technology that is the very antithesis of those high standards. The continuing development of this technology has ominous implications for opera and all music. The digitization process is another case of the dehumanization of society and the deterioration of education. It is an even greater irony that the U.S., which produces the best-trained musicians in the world, is also producing the technology to render them obsolete.
Mr.Pparsons, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati, writes for American Record Guide and Opera magazine.
The Bottom Line
by Patrick J. Smith
It's comforting, I suppose, to know that even in this technological age the Luddites are alive and well. The Luddites, of course, were those nineteenth-century workers who, thrown out of work by machines, revolted and destroyed the machines. They have become martyrs to progress and are nostalgically remembered. They are, however, not remembered enough that we insist on wearing homespun clothes, read by candlelight and refuse to purchase electric stoves (unless we are of the Amish persuasion). Gandhi made a last stand against the machine age, but he too is part of history, except for a movie and an opera, both of which depend upon technology.
I did not see Kentucky Opera's Hansel and Gretel, with its computer realization of the orchestral portion, so I cannot comment on that, but I did chair two panels at OPERA America conferences that involved the team of Bianchi & Smith, and I have heard the technology they produced. Herewith my thoughts:
1. Reports of the death of instrumental music, and of orchestral accompaniment to opera, are grossly exaggerated. We are not going to see, in the near future, a computer replacement for the orchestra in any major opera house in the world, and not in most others, either. The technology, however, as it improves, will encroach (a good Luddite word) upon the borders and will be increasingly in evidence. This will be so for the following reasons:
a) Economic. It was said, by an early Met supporter, that "No one ever paid a nickel to see the back of a conductor," a statement that may have held true until Toscanini appeared on the scene to challenge it. But it remains true that few people come to opera to hear the players in the pit; they come, we are repeatedly told, for the singers onstage. Indeed, in some opera companies the orchestral accompaniment is pretty spotty. If so, and if the potential operagoer is offered opera with live singers and computerized sound at, say, a $30 top, versus opera with live orchestra at, say, a $75 top, will the operagoer consistently choose the latter? (Subsidized music critics, who pay nothing for their seats, should refrain from comment.)
b) Technological (I). I suppose in the dim, dark past there were those who mourned the passing of the krummhorn, the sackbut and the ophicleide, and they must be rejoicing in heaven now that these instruments have been, if limitedly, revived, but music is not exempt from technological advances, which may be looked upon in the beginning as regressions. In every such instance there is hand-wringing and moaning, as well as hilarity and catcalls, at the inevitable technological missteps along the way (such as the infamous Tosca projected-title translation "Give her black eyes"). When early automobiles broke down, as they regularly did, people laughingly shouted "Get a horse!" There are no horses and buggies on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Bianchi & Smith are the first to admit the aural flaws of their computerized system, but they maintain that in seven years the difference with live sound will be negligible. On the basis of the advances in the technology that I have heard, I would not want to bet against them.
c) Technological (II). Most nostalgists resolutely ignore the technological facts of contemporary life, or reduce their importance. Anyone, for instance, who believes that the manufactured sounds emanating from the best audio equipment exactly reproduce the live sound experience believes in the tooth fairy. And yet it is precisely this sound -- first on 78rpm records, then on LPs, now on CDs, with each format having adherents claiming it to be the closest to "natural sound" -- that has formed the aural basis for the great majority of classical-music buffs in the past fifty years. Moreover, the generations who have grown up with rock, and who are now in their forties, are thoroughly accustomed to manufactured, computerized sound, and find no problem in aural acceptance of a computerized sound picture. Similarly, young composers regularly write for computers, which are included in pit orchestras. Indeed, one of the most influential "operas" of the past thirty years, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, is based on computer sound (and one violin).
2. The human factor. This is quite naturally the one insisted on by those who deplore the advance of technology, and it has two aspects: that technology replaces humans with machines (the pure Luddite response), and that a way of life is being lost. As to the first: computerized technology is strongly dependent upon human control, indeed upon there being an active conductor in the pit. There is the ability to phrase and to move with the singers as they shade tempos. These abilities will doubtless continue to improve in succeeding generations of the technology.
The second is quite important, because it involves people and lives. It's easy to understand why the American Federation of Musicians is upset. But the problem is far more complex than it first appears.
Ever since Esterházy closed shop and furloughed all the house musicians, including Haydn, the musician's life has not been an easy one. And that life, in the U.S., has been made more difficult by an ongoing music-business story that regularly goes unreported in the music press -- namely, the fact that American universities and conservatories are every year turning out hundreds of qualified musicians with few job prospects, and that this situation goes on because deans of music schools will not downsize their feifdoms so that supply could more evenly match demand.
The prospect that a machine could take over the few remaining possibilities of live performance must be especially frightening to any music undergraduate, given the uncertain-at-best situation. But by the same token, there is no going back to the days of Esterházy, or to a closer time when musicians could count on some measure of state and federal aid. Congress in its unwisdom, and the small percentage of the populace that votes, has decreed that the arts are irrelevant to our concerns and do not deserve even a pittance of tax monies. In this Darwinian climate, marginal cultural entities will go to the wall unless they can come up with private monies, or unless they can come up with ways to engage a public.
All of this may mean, to some, "the dehumanization of society and the deterioration of education," but to others it represents a variety of new and challenging possibilities. If that is the end of the world, may I suggest as reading The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler's most famous book?