The real question behind these polite, superficial questions is, “Will I, as a performer, find it rewarding to spend the time necessary to learn and perform your new piece?”

This is a really good question. If your art form is painting or sculpture, then you can produce new works on your own, fully formed, without ever really relying on the assistance of anyone else during the creative process. When you are finished, you have produced the thing: it exists exactly as you imagined and created it. If you are a composer who writes a piece for orchestra, you have a written score and maybe a set of parts. You still don’t have the thing: your work has not yet been performed. You are totally reliant on getting a group of talented performers to play your new piece and make this musical idea that you have so carefully sculpted into a reality.

A student of mine (Chad Latta, 19) was recently part of a packed house audience at the world premiere of his orchestra piece, Contentions, performed by the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Neal Gittleman. The piece, which is influenced by Lutoslawski and Corigliano, is substantial and more than a little bit difficult in places. The DPO offered an outstanding performance, and Chad was obviously thrilled with the event.

Contentions was programmed for this concert over a year ago. Lead times like that are typical (sometimes much longer) for professional orchestra performances. Chad submitted the score to Maestro Gittleman along with a “mockup” that he and I did together using East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra (I have the “Platinum ProXP” version, but Gold would have worked just as well for this application).

When the piece was complete, we exported a MIDI file which was written with Human Playback enabled. Then we opened that file in Digital Performer to do some MIDI editing and add in performances of the aleatoric (random) parts. These were notated as pitch groups in boxes (like in Corigliano’s Of Rage And Remembrance) so Finale wasn’t able to “perform” them as Chad wanted. He went through and sequenced these parts individually, which took most of an afternoon. We also had to do some patch changes and keyswitches to get correct articulations and techniques like ponticello and tremolo. It was also necessary to do some editing and reassigning of MIDI controller data, but the end result was pretty good. Not a version that would have been good enough for an application where a real orchestra would be expected, but the conductor was actually quite impressed. Gittleman is a long time Finale user, and he told Chad that his demo recording sounded much better than most of the MIDI files that he listens to. I, for one, am completely convinced that the quality of the sample library (East West) had a lot to do with getting the conductor’s attention and demonstrating Chad’s unrealized vision for Contentions. The result was the supreme accomplishment of winning a premiere by a major, professional orchestra–something that a composer never forgets.

If you have questions about how we did the mockup, or about studying composition, post a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

DS
The Studio Files

For many years this sort of functionality was the province of external hardware synthesizers or the synthesizers built in to a MIDI keyboard. You would record or notate the MIDI notes into the computer and then send that MIDI information back out to a synthesizer which would then play back the sound on that channel. The switch to virtual instruments just means that your computer is now the synthesizer; so instead of investing in external hardware, now we can buy instruments and install them on our workstations and integrate them with notation or sequencing software. Virtual instruments can be programmed to emulate the sound of real instruments, or they can be virtual synthesizers that generate electronic sounds. Check the blogroll for a link to a great post listing some great and inexpensive software synths.

In another post, I wrote about using the Kontakt 2 sampler as a virtual instrument inside of Finale. The “patches” (a term that is a holdover from the days when you used to program synths by making connections with patch cables) were software instruments from the Vienna Horizon Series Solo Strings. Each instrument is sampled (recorded) playing the notes of the whole range of the instruments using different techniques (pizzicato, tremolo, arco) and different dynamics and sustains. In this example, think of Kontakt 2 as the virtual equivalent of a hardware synth module and the string patches as the sounds that are loaded into it. Now I can use Finale as a way to create the right sequence of MIDI messages to play back those samples in real time and hear my composition in a fairly realistic form. Carefully programmed MIDI files intended to co-create the sound of a live ensemble are often called “mockups.” Composers use these mockups to demonstrate the music that they are composing for a film (for example) to a director or music supervisor. It is increasingly necessary for film and tv composers to be able to do realistic sounding mockups of their work. Lots of music (for television especially) is produced entirely with virtual instruments these days.

The second way to compile a list of MIDI messages which will play back sounds through a virtual instrument is with a program like Garage Band, Cubase, Digital Performer, or Sonar, called a sequencer. In this environment you play the performance in via a MIDI controller (usually a keyboard) which the computer records as MIDI data (note on, volume, etc.). It is possible to create very detailed performances in this way without ever using notation, and many composers work primarily in this realm, especially if they are responsible for accomplishing the finished music themselves and aren’t going to be recording the music with a live orchestra or ensemble.

Because I am a classically trained composer, I tend to gravitate to the realm of notation first. I like the functionality of seeing the score and hearing it played back to me by convincing sounding instruments. I have been thrilled to embrace this technology, which was only in the fledgling stages when I started out. If you want to learn to compose music, be sure to pursue training in music theory and notation as well as investment in technology. There is no substitute for the powerful combination of your musical intuition and imagination PLUS the knowledge of melody, harmony and counterpoint that comes through the study of music theory. I will be developing some theory teaching materials on this site over the next few months that use some popular video game music cues as starting points for understanding music theory. Look for those and post comments about specific music that you would like to know more about. Your feedback and questions are always welcome.

Damon
The Studio Files

Well, not exactly. But I am getting started writing a piece for piano quintet that I am going to talk about here. Maybe even post snippets. The main thing is to go through the process of using a notation program to create a piece for live musicians to play. For me, this is where music technology started… way back in 1993 when I got my first computer. It was a Centris 650 (Macintosh) with 8 Meg of RAM and a 25 MHz clock, and it cost me about $1700. I was working on several pieces that would be performed on my Master’s recital and I knew I needed to learn this program called Finale. It was only available for the Mac back then (v. 2.6.9). So with the help of my dad and a student loan, I got the computer, a black & white monitor ($399) a Roland JV-90 keyboard ($1500) and a 300 dpi laser printer ($899). I had already learned a lot about Finale by investing in some lessons from a fellow student (Thanks Mark, wherever you are!), and I dove in.

Finale has come a long way since then. Competition from other software like Sibelius has enriched the feature set and made it a much easier program to learn and use than when I first started. In the last couple of years, Finale has also implemented Native Instruments VI (virtual instrument) hosting within the application which allows you to load up a custom template of instruments from your own library. The Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO) version that also now comes with Finale is a great start for anyone who wants to start composing with sample libraries.

My usual compositional work flow for large orchestra pieces or smaller chamber works is to start with paper and pencil and begin sketching ideas at the piano. Pretty soon I start to develop ideas that are specific to a particular instrument and that takes me to Finale, where I start working things out in more detail. Finale lets me work on several ideas independently that will later be molded into the form of the piece as a whole; there is nothing greater than the flexibility that computer notation gives you to extend a section within the middle of a work, delete measures to tighten up pacing, etc. It also means that I work on a piece differently, and in some senses in a less disciplined way, than pencil and paper composers did. I can dive in without planning and fix it all later, which was a luxury that my teachers and their teachers didn’t really have without the necessity of recopying large swaths of a score.

Personally, I like it better this way!

So, as I said I am just getting started. I am setting up my instrument template (two violins, viola, violoncello, and piano) with the Native Instruments (NI) plug in within Finale. I have used NI (Kontakt especially) with Finale in the past, but it has been with the notation program communicating through Interapplication MIDI. For large scores I have orchestral sounds (East West Quantum Leap Platinum Pro XP) installed on two external Windows PCs that handle the large numbers of notes happening at once (polyphony). But for this piece, I can load all of the articulations that I want inside of Finale–I think.

Here is a picture of the articulations that I have loaded for the viola. You will see that some of the patches are marked TKT. These I have edited using a special technique that alternates different samples when the same note is triggered in succession. Kontakt allows a lot of flexibility and scripting possibilities that let you detail the performance of your sample patches in useful ways. I learned to modify patches in this way by following a tutorial found at kevintweedy.net (Thanks Kevin! and Theodore Krueger who codified this)

I will use patch change messages in Finale to change articulations as the score plays back. Some sounds have keyswitch patch changes (triggered by MIDI notes outside the range of the instrument). If I use these, I put the keyswitches in a lower layer in Finale and then tell Finale to hide that layer. It works pretty well, but I think I am moving towards instrument banks and patch changes more permanently. More on that in an upcoming post.

So once I have the instrument banks loaded, I’ll be ready to start sketching. I’ll keep you posted.

In the mean time, you might like to listen to a couple of orchestral sketches that started life in Finale and then got detailed programming in Digital Performer:

http://damonsink.com/mp3/Arches_sketch2.mp3

http://damonsink.com/mp3/Arches_sketch3.mp3

These are almost all East West Platinum ProXP sounds

Damon
The Studio Files Team