Apareceu no sábado, 10 de junho, no NYT um artigo comparando o problema de interpretar música eletrônica criada para instrumentos obsoletos com problemas associados à performance da "música antiga":<br><br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/arts/music/new-music-works-with-surprising-problem-dated-instruments.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/arts/music/new-music-works-with-surprising-problem-dated-instruments.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all</a><br clear="all">
<br><h1 class="articleHeadline">Electronic Woe: The Short Lives of Instruments</h1> <div class="articleSpanImage"><span>
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<div class="credit">Columbia University Computer Music Center</div>
<p class="caption">Milton Babbitt, Peter Mauzey and Vladimir Ussachevsky, with the RCA Mark II Synthesizer in 1958. </p>
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<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/allan_kozinn/index.html" title="More Articles by Allan Kozinn" class="meta-per">ALLAN KOZINN</a></h6></span>
<h6 class="dateline">Published: June 8, 2012 </h6>IN an onstage interview during an <a title="New York Times review of the concert by Allan Kozinn." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/arts/music/kaija-saariahos-voix-espace-at-zankel-hall.html">evening of music by Kaija Saariaho</a> at Zankel Hall this spring Jeremy Geffen, Carnegie Hall’s director of artistic planning, asked <a title="Web site of Ms. Saariaho." href="http://www.saariaho.org/">Ms. Saariaho</a>
a provocative question, suggested by the nature of the music she was
presenting. Though she writes prolifically for conventional ensembles,
Ms. Saariaho also composes electronic music, and the works performed
that evening not only combined live voices with recorded or
electronically altered live sounds but also had video components, by <a title="Web site of Mr. Barriere." href="http://www.barriere.org/">Jean-Baptiste Barrière</a>, that combined live and recorded elements. <br><br><div class="articleBody">
<p>
That’s a lot of technology, and several glowing Apple laptops sat on the
mixing desk at the back of the hall, running it all. </p><p>
But in a preamble to his question Mr. Geffen noted that he had once
visited the old Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where Milton
Babbitt, Otto Luening and other electronic music pioneers composed on
the room-size RCA Mark II Synthesizer, which was state of the art when
it was built in 1958. Anyone who had ever worked with electronic music
could see where Mr. Geffen was going: visions of 1960s vintage Moog
modules, 1970s Buchla boxes and 1980s Atari computers passed before your
eyes. Mr. Geffen wanted to know how Ms. Saariaho deals with the
technological change that renders an electronic composers’ tools archaic
with alarming frequency. </p><p>
This, Ms. Saariaho acknowledged, was one of her worst nightmares.
Several works on her program dated to the 1980s and ’90s. The technology
behind them had to be revisited before they could be revived. </p><p>
Composers and new-music performers, meet the early-music world.
Harpsichordists, viola da gamba players and devotees of wooden flutes,
valveless horns and string instruments set up differently from their
modern counterparts feel your pain, though only to a degree. Specialists
in music from the Middle Ages through the early Romantic era have a
thriving support industry to rely on: a world of instrument builders who
use antique designs to reproduce the timbres and tactile qualities of
early keyboards, strings, woodwinds, brasses and percussion instruments.
</p><p>
The parallels are not exact of course. Everything moves immensely faster
today than it did in, say, 1800, and instruments (the term now
including computers and music-creation programs) that push the limits of
possibility today may well be landfill three years from now. Whether
this is a function of relentless creativity and innovation or corporate
profit lust — planned obsolescence run amok — the bottom line is the
same: You have to scramble to keep your music playable. </p><p>
That said, period-instrument players can point to times of rapid flux as
well. Anyone who attended the Boston Early Music Festival in 2009 might
have run into a minifestival of pianoforte music in which players
demonstrated a great variety of transitional pianos, each with
strikingly different characteristics of tone and touch. For performers
of the historically informed persuasion this is a complicated issue.
Discussing the pianos, some players expressed preferences for one
maker’s style over another’s, but most agreed that the more pertinent
issue was which pianos particular composers played or owned, and whether
their works bear evidence that they had specific instruments in mind.
</p><p>
Even musicians who take a less fine-grained approach believe that modern
reproductions of period instruments should capture not only the timbres
but also the broader experience that musicians of former times had when
they sat down to play. The transaction involved in <a title="Web page on the workings of a harpsichord." href="http://www.hpschd.nu/index.html?nav/nav-4.html&t/welcome.html&http://www.hpschd.nu/tech/act/jack.html">performing a bass line on a harpsichord</a>,
for example, is a complex interplay of tensions and time lags, a result
of a sequence of actions that starts with the player depressing a key
and ends with a quill plucking a string. How that feels, nearly as much
as how it sounds, influenced the way composers wrote for the instrument,
and it inevitably governs the way interpretations are shaped. </p><p>
Contemporary composers and performers may not entirely share that
concern. Even granting that a work like Babbitt’s “Philomel” (1964), for
a live singer and a taped electronic part, owes its sound and perhaps
even aspects of its structure to the setup at the Columbia-Princeton
center, the moment the electronic element was completed, the synthesizer
was beside the point. Does it make a difference whether a singer
performs the work to the accompaniment of Babbitt’s four-track open-reel
tape — something many halls are unequipped to handle — or the same
recording played on a laptop? Probably not. </p><p>
Still, many electronic works today involve far more complicated
electronics. Interaction now works both ways: Composers can ask singers
and instrumentalists not only to respond to electronic sounds but also
to trigger fresh sounds with their live contributions. And the devices
that govern that kind of activity change rapidly. </p><p>
More conventional instruments do too. Consider the early
(pre-“Satyagraha”) music of Philip Glass. The characteristic sound of
the Philip Glass Ensemble was the acrid whine of a <a title="Web page for Farfisa organs." href="http://farfisa.org/">Farfisa electric organ</a>, a staple of 1960s garage bands. Mr. Glass adopted the Farfisa almost by accident. As he put it in a <a title=""The Touring Composer as Keyboardist," by Allan Kozinn, in "Writngs on Glass," edited by Richard Kostelanetz." href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tykImG0WAsAC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=farfisa+glass+knotty+pine+basement&source=bl&ots=-vhhMyQ5W1&sig=ixHThvV_9lheq6t2zXmfv-KNW2M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HIpnT4SRCaK10AGv9qWmCA&sqi=2&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA">1980 interview</a>,
he needed a portable keyboard and found some used Farfisas, “all in
Queens, in knotty-pine basements, under stairwells.” The instrument was
already a relic when he began using it. And when finding working models
or parts became too time consuming, Mr. Glass’s sound crew switched to
more reliable synthesizers that could sample and more or less reproduce
the Farfisa timbre. But you can tell the difference, and I, for one,
miss the raucous tone of the old Farfisas. </p><p>
Sometimes when technology changes, you cannot replace it with a digital approximation. </p><p>
Ligeti’s <a title="YouTube video of the "Poeme Symphonique" " href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCp7bL-AWvw&search=ligeti">“Poème Symphonique” for 100 metronomes</a>
(1962) should be the easiest of his scores to perform: all you have to
do is wind up the 100 metronomes, start them at exactly the same time
(O.K., that is not so easy) and let them wind down until the last one
stops. </p><p>
But try finding 100 windup metronomes these days. I used to have one,
but that was a few lifetimes ago. I replaced it with a battery-operated
device that kept time more accurately, and now I use an iPhone app that
can be set to the finest gradation of tempo I need and maintains it
accurately until I turn it off. </p><p>
Jenny Undercofler, the director of <a title="New York Times article on the ensemble by Allan Kozinn." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/arts/music/face-the-music-teenage-alt-classical-ensemble.html">Face the Music</a>,
a student ensemble at the Kaufman Center, had her group perform the
“Poème Symphonique” at Merkin Concert Hall in 2008. The Kaufman Center,
near Lincoln Center, has two music schools, so you would think that
metronomes would be plentiful. But the students use newfangled ones, and
Ms. Undercofler had to find a rental house that had the foresight to
stockpile them. </p><p>
If I were a period-instrument maker looking for expansion ideas, I would
keep an eye on this. I’d buy up and recondition old-fashioned
metronomes, Farfisa organs, Buchla and Moog units, Atari computers and
every generation of Mac I could find. I’d warehouse spare parts and
archive hardware schematics and software code. I would probably stop
short of rebuilding the RCA Mark II Synthesizer, but who knows where the
line should be drawn? </p><p>
Someday specialists in 20th- and 21st-century music may decide that the
sampled sounds of antique technology just aren’t good enough. And
someone should be ready to supply the real thing. </p><p> </p><div class="articleCorrection">
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<h6 class="metaFootnote">A version of this article appeared in print on June 10, 2012, on page <span>AR</span><span>12</span> of the <span>New York edition</span> with the headline: Electronic Woe: The Short Lives Of Instruments.</h6>
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</div> </div>-- <br><div>carlos palombini<br></div><a href="http://www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011" target="_blank">www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011</a><br>