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]

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!