Instrumentation in Condition of Real and Virtual Acoustics Around Music

Инструментовкой сегодня занимаются не только композиторы, создающие оркестровые партитуры, но и широкий круг музыкантов - профессионалов и любителей, работающих в различных жанрах электронной музыки. Электронная инструментовка имеет много общего с ее традиционным видом, поскольку в обоих случаях решаются одинаковые задачи: реализация колористического потенциала исходного текста, выстраивание композиционной формы с помощью выделения ее разделов, выстраивание фактуры путем заполнения акустического пространства и прорисовки ее пластов. Различия же обусловлены разной природой музыкального материала. В одном случае - это звучание оркестровых инструментов в концертном зале или на открытом воздухе. В другом - это множество синтезированных звуков в условиях виртуальной акустики, которая может быть представлена в самых разных вариантах. Электронная инструментовка, опираясь на сложившиеся в многовековой академической практике приемы, обогащается за счет использования новых звуков и возможностей управления виртуальным пространством их развертывания. Today, not only composers who create orchestral scores are engaged in instrumentation, but also a wide range of musicians-professionals and amateurs working in various genres of electronic music. Electronic instrumentation has a lot in common with its traditional form, since in both cases the same tasks are solved: realizing the color potential of the source text, building a compositional form by highlighting its sections, building a texture by filling the acoustic space and drawing its layers. The differences are due to the different nature of the sound material. In one case, it is the sound of orchestral instruments in a concert hall or in the open air. In the other case, it is a variety of synthesized sounds in a virtual acoustic environment, characterized by diversity and variability. Therefore, electronic instrumentation, based on the techniques developed in centuries-old practice, is enriched by the use of these new sounds and the ability to manage the virtual space of their deployment.

FM Radio and the New Hollywood Soundtrack

In studio production between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, the period often referred to as “New Hollywood,” the music soundtrack was the site of significant upheaval. As box office revues continued to plummet, the studios allowed filmmakers greater freedom to experiment with narrative structures and with soundtrack conventions. Specifically, they allowed directors to exert new control over film music, which they did often by jettisoning new composed orchestral scores in favor of compilations of preexisting, recorded music. Film music scholars have long acknowledged this shift, but few have recognized the degree to which the new soundtrack practices that emerged in the New Hollywood period were also the result of radical shifts in popular music and contemporary listening practices. By looking at two films from the early 1970s, Zabriskie Point (1971) and The Strawberry Statement (1970, this article considers the degree to which progressive rock, FM radio, and countercultural listening practices changed not only the content of film soundtracks but also the placement of music in film, unseating long-standing sound hierarchies and privileging music in new ways.

Performing Prestige

This chaptertraces the history of orchestral music in silent films in the United States during the period from 1910 to 1958. It provides a case study of short films of symphonic performances from the 1950s to illustrate the role of the orchestra not only in the cinema but also more broadly in American culture. It suggests that while orchestral scores continue to play an important role in certain genres of American cinema, they no longer characterize a particular theater’s exhibition style or studio’s soundtrack.

Reflections in an Eastern Mirror, or Performance of a French Vaudeville in Russia

Exceedingly popular in their day, Russian vaudevilles and opera-vaudevilles of the first third of the nineteenth century are not available in modern orchestral scores. Although many of these musical comedies are known to be adapted from French works, for the most part the original French titles are unknown, as are the differences in French and Russian treatments of musical numbers. Focussing primarily on Pisarev's Babushkiny popugai [Grandma's Parrots] (St. Petersburg, 1819), this article compares the original French vaudeville with its Russian adaptation on several points: libretto, performance venues, and musical treatment, the latter based in part on manuscript sources of Alexei N. Verstovsky's orchestral scores.

London, St John's Smith Square: David Matthews's ‘A Vision and a Journey’

A Vision and a Journey is David Matthews's op. 60 – a neat coincidence, then, that the first performance of its revised version should be part of the celebrations of his sixtieth birthday. The work is part of a series of imposing orchestral scores Matthews has been composing over the past two decades, beginning with In the Dark Time in 1983 and continuing with Chaconne in 1985 and The Music of Dawn two years later; this one followed in 1993, when it was premièred by Yan Pascal Tortelier and the BBC Philharmonic, but it underwent a thoroughgoing revision between March 1996 and March 1997. I asked the composer before the concert what the revisions had entailed: ‘I completely rewrote the whole thing. It's more or less a new work’.