The first bit of datum from the unintentional symphony. From Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra's season finale on March 3, 2011 with Mozart's Overture to Don Giovanni, Brahms' Nanie and Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. This is the proto-version of the project's format.
I love this; however, I have a few criticisms:
ReplyDeleteWhy are you emphasizing tuning? The practicing / warming up before a show is always more interesting than the tuning before a piece. Also, why does your piece start with a tuning? What happened to the practicing before the concert? This is always the most intense practice (the musicians need to warm-up), which creates the most interesting cacophony.
Also, you seem to have made the same fatal mistake that I made when I did my recording: you sat too far away from the orchestra. The crowd drowns out the cacophony-practicing tracks that you made. I realized that for a convincing recording of the most interesting aspect of a conservative symphony's performance (the warm-up before the show), one must sit within the first few rows nearest the orchestra.
One last thing: you need to stop tapping the recorder!!! These recordings are nearly ruined by the percussive taps of your handling of the recorder (sounds like you were holding it, rather than setting it down on the armrest). If you end up with lots of percussive taps in a recording, you should run the recording through an audio compressor (the one in Audacity works great) with a low compression ratio and a high threshold (this will minimize the loud percussive hits on the recording, without altering the rest of the dynamics of the recording -- the worst thing you could do is squish it flat with too much compression).
Other than these criticisms, I love the fact that you are actually making a large project out of this idea! The recordings you made of these three famous works are FAR more interesting than the works themselves.