Classical musicians and the digital tools they love

December 14, 9:00 AMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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It is hardly a secret that musicians of all stripes and persuasions have eagerly embraced tech goodies, nor is that enthusiasm a recent phenomenon.

After all, it was musicians who fueled the development of modern instruments, as they expressed their dissatisfaction with the instruments of their day — composers in particular helped things along by writing past the capabilities of the instruments of the time.

One thinks of Mozart who did so much to encourage the development of the clarinet, Beethoven whose intensity and strength helped to usher in the modern piano, or Berlioz and Wagner who both expanded the orchestra.

Early Recordings and Instruments

With the coming of electronic tools, musicians were also quick to the table; the august Arthur Nikisch and his equally resplendent Berlin Philharmonic gave us a complete Beethoven Fifth before WWI, a feat of engineering, patience, and imagination a bit difficult to imagine these days with recording being so ubiquitous.

Early electronic instruments such as the theremin and Ondes Martenot had their followers, such as Bernard Herrmann for the theremin and Olivier Messiaen with the Ondes Martenot.

Theremin (left) and Ondes Martenot (right)

By the time FM synthesis came along, there were composers quick and ready to step in with ideas and compositions — think Stockhausen, Varèse, and such folk.

The folks at Princeton experimented with early computers as compositional tools, laboriously creating compositions out of punched cards and frustration. Nowadays their labors can be reconstructed easily on any home computer, but that does not lessen the scope of their achievements or the courage of their imagination. They were the pioneers in the Conestoga wagons, scraping their way across the plains so eventually the rest of us could whiz by on the Interstate or overhead in the latest Boeing jet.

MIDI

It was the advent of digital technology that brought it all into the mainstream. The transforming MIDI ("Musical Instrument Digital Interface") protocol was originally developed in order to help synth keyboards talk to each other; it turned out to be the Ethernet of the musical world. With MIDI, a musical composition can be specified in a manner similar to, but much more sophisticated than, an old-time player-piano roll. At time x, start note y at volume z; at time x, change patch to p; at time x, end note y at volume z, and so forth. There are MIDI messages for all manner of musical phenomena, plus plenty of uncommitted messages left in the specification to allow for future growth. MIDI can be used to do almost anything as a result. Just send those messages, store them, modify them, slow them down, speed them up, what you will.

Digital Sampling

Digital sampling entered broad consciousness around the same time, slating cheesy synthesized sounds for the near-future scrap heap. Instead of some silly quasi-plunked piano sound, you could sample a 9' Hamburg Steinway and reproduce it with uncanny realism, provided of course that you had the necessary storage space and processing power for the vast amounts of data involved.

Add to that the newfound ability of computers to display graphics onscreen (and print them), and you've got musical notation software that can create self-playing scores with ever-increasing levels of realism, and offering unlimited possibilities to the imagination.

At this point one discerns a slight divergence between the 'classical' and 'pop' worlds. (Once again I find myself using terms I dislike, and can't really define successfully.) At the risk of speaking stupidly in far too general terms, it would seem that the pop musicians are on the whole more interested in sound production tools while the classical musicians tend to huddle around the notational end of things.

Of course you can find wide exceptions to the above generalization, musicians who are interested equally in both, and so forth. Like all "type-A/type-B" categorizations, it's only the roughest of approximations.

Sequencers and Recording Studios

On the sound-production end of things, the standard tool is the sequencer, software for storing MIDI messages. However, sequencers have moved far beyond their original humble origins and are now recording-studio powerhouses, capable of recording live music and mixing it with sampled materials, modifying the streams in limitless ways, and handling all elements of the production from soup to nuts.

Pro Tools and Logic Studio more or less own this end of the business; in some ways the choice between the two is similar to the distinction between Avid and Final Cut Studio software for video/movie editing. Again a generalization, but Pro Tools is more recording-focused, while Logic Pro is more strongly rooted in its sequencer origins (even going so far as to include a serviceable music notation feature.) There remain other excellent products as well (it's a sizeable market) such as Digital Performer and the Cubase family, not to mention the gigantic army of sound-generation products such as Reason or Absynth.

Macintosh-based Logic Pro comes in a stripped down flavor (Logic Express), but its main features are best known to Mac users in the form of GarageBand, a kind of Logic-for-Everybody. GarageBand is, in fact, a powerful music production application, aimed at bringing music production to nonprofessionals; it's the musical equivalent of iMovie, which brings some of the features of Final Cut to the general user.

Music Notation Software

In the music notation world, there are two champions: Finale and Sibelius. There have been other contenders, to be sure; Score still has its adherents in the professional publishing world, for example. Less comprehensive, but nonetheless highly competent, applications have their adherents — Noteworthy Composer comes to mind, for example. A much-heralded program called Igor never quite happened, although there is a website and apparently one can still actually purchase the software — although it appears to have stopped development years ago.

Both Finale and Sibelius are expensive, Photoshop-grade applications designed to meet the demands of the most discerning professional. They're overkill for a lot of users, and thus both programs come in stripped-down, cheaper versions.

Finale

Originally the two programs were dramatically different. I was an early Finale user who learned the program in its version 1 incarnation, on a Macintosh SE. This was an exercise in patience, and an adventure in searching the encylopedic user manuals. The early Finale was a nightmare of nested dialog boxes, with one option leading on to another dialog box, which led to yet another one, and so forth. One found instructions such as "press ENTER seven times" in the user manual, as you dismissed the receded series of modal dialogs one at a time. It was slow, my word it was slow. But even in version 1 it was a powerhouse, enabling an everyday user to create beautifully printed scores that would have been utterly impossible without a music publishing house just a few years earlier. Finale was to music notation what PageMaker had been to desktop publishing.

A Finale screen

Fortunately the Finale programmers got to work on the user interface and eventually produced a program which wasn't a Rube Goldberg machine gone psychotic. Nonetheless the warts are still there if you know where to look for them; this was a program that for a long time changed its behavior dramatically depending upon which tool you were using — one tool required a double-click, another might require a shift-click, while another would select with little boxes and another would use an inverted rectangle and...well, you get the general drift. They've cleaned it up, but the old behaviors lurk under the surface.

From its inception Finale has been the music notation program that can notate anything. If you're willing to dig deep enough and learn it well enough, even the most complex avant-garde scores can be created and given playback capabilities.

Sibelius

Sibelius was originally available for the British Acorn computer and came to the PC and Mac world later. When I encountered its very first incarnation I was an instant convert from Finale. I have remained a loyal Sibelius guy ever since, even though once in a while the program has challenged my friendship.

Sibelius originally offered blinding speed on even modest computer hardware, but more than anything else, it was programmed with an elegantly thoughtful interface that made using the program as instinctive as such software can be. That elegance remains unchanged from that original version (we're at Sibelius 5 now), although the program has acquired a Finale-sized range of capabilities, including a really spiffy video-scoring component.

A Sibelius screen

I'm unusual amongst music-software-notation users in that I have a regular need to create Schenkerian graphic analyses. While most of the time Schenkerian analysis is still best created by hand (the graphs are art forms in and of themselves), Sibelius is at least flexible enough to allow creating Schenkerian graphs without overwhelming angst. Finale can do it, but you're facing a fight to the death.

Finale vs. Sibelius

Composers seem to be about evenly divided between the two major notation packages, although I always steer first-timers to Sibelius. Despite Finale's massive improvements, Sibelius remains easier to learn. Both applications produce beautiful printed scores, can generate parts automatically, and in general make a musician's life easier.

And they have put an end to the worst aspect of performing new music: players have been liberated from deciphering a composer's handwritten manuscript. Some composers were careful autographers, but many weren't, and among my most painful memories of the pre-digital era was trying to squint may way through a careless composer's chicken-scratching. This may not have improved the overall quality of new-music performances measurably, but it certainly has done away with at least one needless aggravation.