That's really helpful, especially the part about having the entire brass section accompany a single clarinet. Were you thinking of a specific movie when you mentioned that or is it fairly common?

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This is a great argument framework to remember when discussing people with illogical arguments. One of the most effective ways to meaningful change someone's mind/position is to use their framework against them.

For example, the argument of we should keep coal power plants/mines/etc because changing would put them out of work. Memorize a few of these for various frameworks, and go change the world one calm discussion at a time!

Good explanation. Seen some musicals with canned (pre-recorded) backing tracks, and the undertone really tends to sound kinda stiff (edit: compared to pit band music, which is more lively).

Of course, a lot of pop megastars use canned tracks, and they intentionally compensate with flashing lighting effects and pyrotechnics.

This is not the place to discuss AI art until at least 2043.

I recall when the Musician's Union in New York protested against the use of string machines (polyphonic keyboard synthesizers) on Broadway in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

In any art form there’s the art, but also the craft. You can have the best idea or theme for a painting, but if you don’t understand the craft of mixing paints to make the right shade, you probably won’t become a well regarded painter.

As a composer you can have an amazing idea or even an amazing melody, but if you don’t understand how to write it in a way that real musicians can play, it won’t be a successful musical work.

So practically that means things like having enough rests in the parts so players aren’t playing too much without a break. Writing parts not just in the high register which may be more physically taxing. Not having a melody in one clarinet that’s accompanied by the entire brass section, because it wouldn’t get heard without microphones and amplification.

There are plenty more examples I could come up, with but those are a few that don’t work well for live performance, but are easily overcome in the world of studio recording where you can adjust the balance any way you want, or stop and re record passages at will, or save the upcoming difficult passage to record tomorrow when everyone’s fresh again.

That doesn’t mean that film scores aren’t great art. It just means that they weren’t designed with the same “live performance” type requirements in mind. The craft of film scoring is a bit different than the craft of writing a symphony.

That's what this post is about.

I'll keep this in mind, but without further context, it's really just a bit of trivia to me. How is it different than symphonies or other pieces that were meant to be played straight through?

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Thanks for asking. Good question.

This isn't even touching on the long-standing Broadway tradition of providing live music for performances.

When you have recorded music, it's the same every time. Obviously. And there are good things to say about that.

You record it once in a studio and it's done. And you can do as many takes as necessary to get the quality you want. You can't vary it even slightly per performance.

But when you have a pit of musicians, the conductor is free to change tempos and pull out more emotions from the musicians, and essentially mix the music in real time by telling certain sections to bring their parts out or be a little more quiet.

All that translates to a better quality, humanized, energetic, and emotional performance. And pro musicians add an amazing amount of quality when playing live. Plus, playing music through a sound system, no matter how technologically advanced is not superior to live instruments playing in the same room.

The trade off is a slight bit more consistency with a recording vs. a better, more emotional, humanistic performance live.

It's like saying, "Why do I need to go see a 90+ musician symphony perform in a concert hall when I can listen to the studio recording?"

Had another thought on live music vs. recorded... A lot of symphonies are now presenting popular movies like Star Wars, The Princess Bride, Singin' In The Rain, etc. and playing the soundtracks live, under the movie while the movie is playing.

They've been doing this for a few decades now and it's getting a lot more popular. They usually present a few performces of a few movies every year. It's a really cool performance if you can attend.

But it's a big difference hearing a 90+ musician symphony orchestra playing the music live vs. in a movie theater or on a big screen TV at home.

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> This makes more and more people superfluous.

Then global unemployment must have reached 100% 10,000 years ago, and stayed there: https://reason.com/2007/09/26/the-4-boneheaded-biases-of-stu/

###Make-Work Bias

> I was an undergraduate when the Cold War ended. I still remember talking about military spending cuts with a conservative student. The whole idea made her nervous; she had no idea how a market economy would absorb the discharged soldiers. In her mind, to lay off 100,000 government employees was virtually equivalent to disemploying 100,000 people for life.

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