Timbre!
Timbre is a beautifully dyslexic word. It is also the subject of a recent post over at Black Dogs (one of the rare blogrolled blogs I really regularly read, and not just for the food and gratuitous cleavage) in which R.A.D. Stainforth discusses the topic of orchestras covering rock songs, and vice versa. His particular complaint is that whoever orchestrated Queen for the RPO decided to do it in a fairly mundane fashion. Instead of rearranging the songs in a musically interesting way, they decided to simply let the novelty of the re-instrumentation sell the performance.
The thing that really interested me was the issue of timbre. Stainforth reckons that whoever orchestrated the music failed to recognize that this is a defining feature of much rock/pop music. Or maybe that shouldn’t be rock/pop… perhaps a more appropriate description is music which is primarily heard in a pre-recorded fashion.
It’s probably exactly because the music is pre-recorded as opposed to being performed live that there are such possibilities for a varied sonic palette. Sounds can be layered, altered, edited, without needing to conform to the requirement that live performers with instruments must be able to reproduce the sounds.
As Mr. S points out, this overabundance of timbre in non-classical music means that listeners who come to classical from this direction (like me) can have a hard time adjusting to the relatively limited amount of sounds an orchestra can produce. After a year or so of listening your ears adjust and it’s easier to pick stuff out, but initially everything just sounds kind of “orchestra-ey”.
Is there any particular reason why “classical” music has to be able to be performed live? It seems in a sense that this is a defining feature of the genre, that it must be reproducible. The unit of classical musical creation is the score, not the recording. This reminds me of the process (a bit too close to my heart) of writing science papers, where an experiment (and thus a publication) is totally useless unless it contains enough information for someone else to reproduce it. Classical music is fundamentally open-source.
Can anyone think of examples of music considered “classical” which doesn’t conform to this conception? Or alternatively, examples of music which might be considered classical if only they did conform to it?
Tags: black dogs, classical music, music