Today I made a mockup (I used orches­tra sam­ples to ren­der a syn­the­sized per­for­mance) of a sec­tion of Swan Lake, for a cool project that I can’t talk about at the moment. And, to my delight, it was even more fun than hang­ing out in that new twisty rooftop park at Lin­coln Cen­ter that reminds me of Go, Dog. Go!

Orches­tra mock­ups under­lie a con­tem­po­rary malaise among pro­fes­sional musi­cians. And there’s good rea­son for that: it’s harder for pro­fes­sional musi­cians to get gigs today—especially in  film, tele­vi­sion, and com­mer­cial music—because there are fewer record­ing ses­sions, and because those Broad­way orches­tra pits keep shrink­ing. Com­posers, direc­tors, and audi­ences have grown com­fort­able with sam­pled instru­ments, which are often mixed with live instru­ments to cover their weak­nesses. But the com­poser isn’t all to blame! Com­posers work with fewer live instru­ments and more sam­pled instru­ments because {α} it’s an option, and {β} it’s a good way to stay in the bud­get and on sched­ule. No way does this excuse James Horner’s abom­inable score for Apoc­a­lypto, how­ever.

I sym­pa­thize with both con­stituen­cies, par­tially because I’ve always had a split mind about tech­nol­ogy. On one level, I can’t get enough. I mean, I’ve learned how to code this web­site, record music in my room, do lots of audio pro­duc­tion,  do graphic design when I feel like it, & make all my own key­board short­cuts for Sibelius. I bought an iPod in 2003. I dig tech. But some­times I’m super wary of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. I pre­fer the direct­ness of phys­i­cal things: pages, acoustic instru­ments, face-to-face social inter­ac­tion, wax cylin­ders (?). On days when I’m most techno­pho­bic, I go into the guest room at the end of the hall, sit at the awe­some antique account­ing desk, and write music with a ruler and pen­cil sharp­ener; or I kayak in the Hudson.

This lud­dite ten­dency is prob­a­bly why I chose to ded­i­cate my artis­tic energy to live instru­ments, and my music to paper. It’s there­fore impor­tant to know that mak­ing a good score (which is a set of instruc­tions) and mak­ing a good mockup (which is the sound itself) are very dif­fer­ent tasks. I haven’t done much in the way of mock­ups, because I spend most of my time on projects mak­ing detailed and clean scores. I have spent very lit­tle time and energy mockup-ing my music.

But I had to make one today, and I real­ized that con­duc­tors would have a ball doing this! You get to make tiny adjust­ments to the place­ment, length, artic­u­la­tion, and vol­ume of every note. Your musi­cians are lit­tle pup­pets, and you get to freeze time and com­mand each player to do your exact bid­ding. It’s pos­si­ble that doing this could make you a bet­ter musi­cian. You can adjust the bal­ances in the orches­tra precisely—less 2^nd flute, less clar­inet, more 3^rd horn, slight ritard. before the third beat, & etc. In that way, it’s like run­ning conductor-practice rehearsals with an orches­tra. I found, too, that you can learn a lot about style by exper­i­ment­ing with a phrase. If you just cut off a few notes slightly before the beat, the phrase sud­denly projects greater clar­ity. Or use another instru­ment to artic­u­late a note, and then quiet the inner voices to cre­ate a trans­par­ent sound in the winds. It makes you feel like Gus­tav Mahler, whom you can vir­tu­ally hear yelling at the orches­tra just by look­ing at his scores.

Here is a live orches­tra (Boston, I think), play­ing Swan Lake No.13c, mea­sures 81–100, as well as my mockup of the same passage:

That sec­ond clip is my per­for­mance. I am the con­duc­tor because I made the per­for­mance deci­sions from Tchaikovsky’s score, same as if I had made them in a room of musi­cians. You’ll notice the sound is tin­nier, the vio­lins are maybe a lit­tle loud, and that the clar­inets are louder on the stac­cato chords at the end of the pas­sage. How­ever, my winds are more together on those chords, and the vio­lin melody is a lit­tle clearer. The point is, orches­tra mock­ups are use­ful to musi­cians, too. Fur­ther­more, there are some con­duc­tors in the world who should switch careers and start deal­ing with sam­pler orches­tras. The live play­ers will be thankful.