After reviewing the problems and possibilities, she ended by saying “…or you can just accept the fact that some aspects of your music will be ephemeral.”

Actually, I think the electronic keyboards you discuss are rapidly discarded by musicians in favor of “this year’s model” for a very good reason: because the player has relatively little control over individual notes, any given patch is soon perceived as boring (’dated’).

Just think of how many expressive choices a violinist has with every note. Compared to that, a synth is less expressive than your average mallet percussion.

Of course this is true of all keyboard instruments, with the unique exception of the piano (which compensates in ways too complex to state briefly).

And this is something that John Adams has been aware of since he began experimenting with electronic sounds decades ago. You can practically trace the history of commercial synthesizers throught his work, The Wound Dresser: a synthesizer part originally composed on a Yamaha HX Electone, then adapted for SY-77, then SY-99, adapted again for Kurzweil K2000 (or higher), and now available for Kontakt 3.

Luckily, John has a fantastic sound designer on his team, Mark Grey, who has been working to reformat the sampler and synthesizer parts for Kontakt and has done so for John’s most performed works. It is, however, a laborious project and will take awhile to complete. Whenever the Kontakt 3 version is available, we send a copy of these samples alongside whatever version for hardware sampler that we have on hand — generally for K2000 or K2500 which are also compatible with newer Kurzweils and a wide variety of other keyboards — so that the orchestra can choose whichever format suits them. When we them formatted for Kontakt, we are also sending raw samples which can be mapped onto any sampler.

There a matter of economics too. We are in a period of transition, no question. For many orchestras with smaller budgets, it is not feasible to invest in a computer system powerful enuogh to reliably run a software synth, not to mention the cost of the program itself. For them, renting a K2500 is still the most affordable option. They are still reasonably easy to acquire through instrument rental agencies and many keyboard players still own one. Few orchestras have sound designers and engineers in house at this point, so we must also ensure there is an option that requires little technical knowledge so that the technical requirements do not become too daunting. This is changing, however, and we at Boosey & Hawkes look forward to the day when there is a universal sampler format and this continual game of updates is behind us, and an engineer is as indispensible as a concertmaster.

In the meantime, we will continue to keep the patches that composers like John Adams and Steve Reich spent so much time crafting up to date. We are certainly not in the practice of letting incredible music die, and this is incredible music we’re talking about, after all.

I look forward to the next insightful post.

I guess virtually none of the old synths have been held in high enough regard to be preserved—while more specific older electronic instruments like the theremin and ondes Martenot are still available, in some limited way? That’s sad.

The other rather devilish thought is one almost voiced explicitly by Roger: that we may see the rise of a not-very-old instrument revival of sorts focused on recreating, restoring and maintaining old synths. I want to see those one-time-ubiquitous DX7s on the stage, with the Yamaha logo and all!

And despite the difficulties, surely a sufficiently virtuosic group of players could figure ways to duplicate the FM synthesis sounds—hilariously, developed to conserve computational resources in those olden times. Foss gave us some examples of just how unlikely some of the sounds out of woodwinds can be when he was on his multiphonics kick (I recall it took days to get some of the noises out of my system heard in a performance of his Cave of the Winds).

(cackles evilly)

I hope you understand how sad, infuriating, and unfortunate it is to invest so much time into something you think is a great step in the evolution of live performance, only to see it discarded with last year’s models.

It occurs to me that another composer might say: Who cares? I’m writing for audiences right now; who cares about the future? And that is a good attitude to have as well. The old “I’m writing for future audiences” is just weird.

You make a valid point that modern synths don’t have the longevity that traditional reliable orchestral instruments do. But there are a lot of web sites out there that offer sampled versions of classic synths, and at least two or three pieces of software that can automatically sample a piece of gear and map it in a sampler (Autosampler, etc.). Samplers, too, will change over time, but there are some universal formats that will certainly be readable and convertable for decades (or longer) to come – formats like Giga, EXS, or Kontakt.

Maybe composers should begin offering downloads of the patches required to play their pieces. It’s certainly not hard to do.

I like this solution better than telling composers, “Only compose for the tried-and-true instruments!” While there will always be a place for traditional orchestral writing, there’s definitely a place for expanding the sound palette of the traditional orchestra as we look forward. I think it’s part of orchestral music evolving with the times.

I do kind of think that John Adams’ (and similar) attempts to add a synth part to the orchestra weren’t extremely well developed. The synth parts are kind of “token” and yes, now they sound dated. Also, they’re somewhat unnecessary — most of his pieces play fine without the synth part, or (hypothetically) those synth parts could be reorchestrated to other instruments in the orchestra with no ill effects to the music. However, as a composer and sound designer myself, I think of the amazing things that would be possible in combining a synth like Absynth with traditional orchestral writing.

Just a thought…