Yesterday

[da]

Before melted_snowball's concert yesterday, I hung out with my friend and former co-worker mynatt and his mom.

...Did you know that for large enough churches or other classical music venues, musicians who are up in a balcony or otherwise far from the conductor basically can't rely on the sound of their choirmates at all? The speed of sound will throw things off badly enough to make a mess of things unless you rely on visual cues.

I just did the calculations (actually, google did). Say a musician is 140 feet (42 meters) from the conductor. If a run of 1/8th-note beats happen to be 1/8-second each, that poor musician is hearing everything a whole beat behind everyone else.

Cool.

After the concert, I got a few photos of the spem in alium score. The conductor's looked like regular sheet music, but about twice as tall. The chorus's has 8 different versions of course, one for each chorus section; each has a compressed version of the other 7 sections, and the 5 parts in their own section. I love the notes this chorister put at the front of theirs...






...If you look really closely, someone has inserted a 'V' before Alium. Now we know what some of the choristers think of the piece. :)

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

The real thing to notice is that F. has put in his score "COUNT OR DIE" and "DON'T PANIC". In Choir 8, which comes in at measure 30 or so, we all spent the first 25 bars with our eyes focused on 25 bars of rest, still measuring out each bit of time.

Acck.

[purplesofa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the photos - I was wondering how it would be scored!

The other obvious question is, what's the point of having 40 parts? There are only 12 notes available (from A to G#) and not all combinations thereof are harmonic... (I can answer this, but I bet other people have asked.)

Did the composer have a reason for doing something so difficult for the choir? Having singers encircle the audience is a good effect, but could be done with fewer parts.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

According to the conductor, we don't know exactly why Spem was composed; it might have been for either royalty who was alive when Tallis was composing (Queen Elizabeth or Mary); or it might have simply been a response to another composer who wrote something for 16 parts. At least partly, the answer to "why so difficult" and "why so many parts" is surely "because it could be done!"

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Well, part of it is surely the richness of hearing a chord in many octaves at once: the last note is (I vaguely recall) G-major in all 8 choirs, but that's from the low bass G in the basses of some choirs up to a high C in some sopranos. Which is 3-1/2 octaves of G-major.

Also, having some of the choirs singing different words from others, or at different speeds, makes the piece quite a bit more interesting. Tallis is able to make different themes appear in different parts of the performance space.

I've done pieces in 12 parts before (antiphonal double choir, with 6 parts in each choir), and this was probably more exciting for the audience. But probably 16 parts, as four 4-part choirs, would have been almost as cool.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether I (as a basically untrained listener) would've been able to tell the difference if you had been the same number of people, in the same configuration, singing four 4-part choirs? That is to say, instead of 7-10 people in each choir singing 5 parts, 7-10 people singing 4 parts; and doubled choirs (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4 instead of 1,2,3, .. 8).

I expect I would only be able to tell when, say, choir 1 was different from 2 (or 1 and 2 were each doing something different in harmony with 7 and 8 respectively!)

That was one of the neatest part of it for me, how I could appreciate the space between the choirs.

[arcticturtle.livejournal.com]

Could you lessen the speed-of-sound problem by pressurizing the performance venue?

OH, that score looks hard. That "Don't Panic!" note must be very necessary.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Even if you could (and not kill the performers...) it'd be totally hopeless. Regardless of whether the choir is singing what they're hearing or what they're seeing, the typical case where this matters is in antiphonal pieces (like Spem).

And very often, the audience is between the two (or more) choirs. So it's impossible that they will all hear the music in sync; there will be some people who are closer to one choir than the other.

Conveniently, your ear works things out, and it'll sound fine. The human brain is so cool!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Could you lessen the speed-of-sound problem by pressurizing the performance venue?

Yes, according to yon wikipedia.
Though it would be easier to make the problem worse, by elevating the performance venue to 10-20 thousand meters, where the speed of sound is a measly 295 m/s.

In order to reduce the severity of the problem by a similar amount (45 meters/second), the air temperature would need to be raised to 90 degrees Celcius, where the speed of sound is a convenient 385 m/s.