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...
( Read more... )
...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...
( Read more... )