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

[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!"