very good point I think.
Reading the comments, I think I must try to express my ideas more clearly. I am not trying to get Dorico to take over the art of writing music from or for composers using Artificial Intelligence. That already exists and is pretty scary.
Nothing to do with esthetics, or applying the rules of traditional music theory, or orchestration, or good writing automatically. After all beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, or in the case of music, beauty is in the ears of the beholder. Some love and emulate Bach and Bethoven, others love and emulate Stockhausen and Jhon Cage.
It is more the physical and mechanical limitations and attributes of instruments that I am concerned with, as an extreme example, you should not write three-part harmony or even melody for the triangle, because it can only produce one note.
What I would find helpful is simply with the help of Dorico, prevent the situation, which occurs often, of submitting a piece to a director and being told off. Are you crazy? This is impossible to play, the violin simply cannot do that! Nothing to do with virtuosity or fingering choices. Let me try to analyse the mechanics of the group of instruments that can be grouped under keyboard instruments with pedals. This group of instruments can play up to 10 notes simultaneously, because our hands normally have 10 fingers. Allowing us to write up to 10-part harmony for them. I know no one does this. One can of course play more than 10 notes simultaneously by placing one or two arms across the keyboard, but best not to get into that kind of eccentric playing now for the sake of clarity. I hope it is beginning to become clear that I am concerned with the mechanical aspects of playing and not with the esthetics. As far as I know, wind instruments, including woodwinds and Reed instruments can only play one note at a time, and are therefore limited to melody, this being a very big difference between these two groups. Of course, harmonies can be written for string instruments by writing for several players. Wind instruments however in contrast with keyboard instruments, can produce a much greater variety of timbers, this they have in common with string instruments that are played with a bow. This variety of sounds, of timbers, is what makes their sound much more difficult to reproduce with virtual instruments. Virtual keyboard instruments and percussion instruments tend, for this reason, to sound more real than wind or string instruments, but that is for another discussion.
Here I am primarily concerned with the mechanical limitations of real instruments. Keyboard instruments, taking advantage of the sustain pedal, can produce smooth melody lines in Legato using notes that are very far apart in pitch, theoretically one can write notes jumping 7 octaves and still sounding legato. I don’t know if this is true of string or wind instruments. I suspect it is not. I suspect certain physical, mechanical limitations would get in the way and only certain combinations of notes can be played in rapid succession. I Imagin violins can touch two strings simultaneously to produce many bitonal passages, but perhaps some combinations are not physically possible. I would like to know which ones. I hope a violin player joins the discussion and enlightens me on the mechanical limitations and the mechanical advantages of string instruments. Likewise, a wind instrument player, and so on. Also, it would be great to have someone from inside Dorico to contribute.
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That’s who I’ve got. He’s apparently released two performances which might explain why the rest of his catalogue is so small. I dug it off my phone today to have a listen - first time in a long while and got through about the first 200 mins, which I think is longer than it was listed as in the Guinness Book of Records, and there’s still almost an hour left!
Back in 1979 when I was 16 and just about to run the First Bexhill Festival of Modern Music I spoke to Yonty Solomon, who I’d seen play part of it on TV, and who 3 years earlier had become the first person to be given permission by Sorabji to play his music after his ‘ban’, to see if he wanted to play a Sorabji concerto if the festival was successful enough to have orchestral concerts at the second. He was up for it but I was an enormously over-optimistic 16-year old, the festival was far from a massive success, so that didn’t happen but hey!
I’ll constrain my response to a pragmatic one: given the necessary complexity of a hypothetical algorithm capable of assessing contextually the difficulty/playability of music, were the Dorico Dev Team to decide to tackle this, I suspect they would have little to no time left for any other improvements and additions to the software. I further suspect we’d all regret that.
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I don’t even like software dealing with my page-turns. Proof-checking tools like range colours and the odd compositional assistant like explode, transform and reduce are very useful to save time, at least as a starting point. But beyond that, there’s too much of these things about “playability” that are tightly embedded into creativity that I do see it as misspent development time also.
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Actually a vast majority of good orchestration books are not just about orchestrating sounds together, but will dive very deep into the physical mechanics and possibilities of instruments and players, including tips and guidelines as to how to write for instruments in a way that is practical.
For example every orchestration book I’ve read on strings will give you advice on how to write for double stops (what’s physically possible and impossible), and sound advice around other physical limitations such as giving your players a little bit of time to switch techniques, issues around string crossings, and more. I could go on. It does sound to me like if you spend a bit of time with one of these books and studying the scores, it will answer a vast majority of your questions about what is physically possible or not.
The other thing to consider is the exponential complexity of once you start combining techniques together, different instrument types used (which may or may not have features available to the player, certain pitch extensions to go lower or trill keys or what have you, and numerous other variables). This is not even going into what might be considered possible by a high school orchestra, an amateur community orchestra, vs. a professional mid-tier orchestra vs. a professional top-tier orchestra. What is possible for the latter may not be possible (or advisable) for the amateur orchestra.
I’m sure you could cover some of the basics, black and white general details that are global, such as a double-stop checker, but stuff like a fingering checker could be more confusing than helpful because it can be really specific to the player’s skills, hand-sizes, and the features available to their unique instrument, not to mention preferences of the different available fingering systems (such as with woodwinds which often have multiple ways to finger the same thing).
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Well, you could, by writing for multiple triangles played by the same percussionist. Would you want Dorico to tell you not to?
Multiphonics are possible on a great number of wind instruments. If that’s what a composer is after and the player is up to the task, you could go nuts with that as well. Again, would you want Dorico to prevent you from doing so?
I picked out these two points to illustrate what others have already said: you can’t isolate technical or physical possibilities of any instrument from your creative process, and there really is no quick & dirty way to avoid learning the basics about the instruments/ensembles you want to write for.
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I agree wholeheartedly with the posters here who recommend doing the work involved in learning what instruments are capable of and not expecting Dorico to do it. It’s part of the job! If it hasn’t already been mentioned, I find Handbook of Instrumentation by Andrew Stiller very useful. It not only gives the pitch ranges but also lists limitations, dynamic possibilities in each range and even discusses what is deemed to be difficult or impossible. This 500+ page book is even available online or as PDF.
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Also, I think that kind of functionality would only make things worse by fooling you into thinking you know what’s playable. Also note the difference between technically playable and good idea.
At uni, I played in an ensemble that was a canvas for the composition students. That was fun, and interesting. But most of all it cemented a belief in me that composers should be musicians, and need to learn how the instruments work. I don’t mean that instruments should be restricted to their stereotypical roles - I can play as softly on my trumpet as any flute or violin player, and I suspect no instrumentation book would recommend giving the solo in Jaws to the tuba instead of a french horn (having it in the tuba is awesome, if only playable by a really good tubaist) - but the composer needs to know that there is a vast difference between the sounds their music writing software makes and what happens when you give the written music to a musician. What is the difference between these different instruments playing the same thing? And the solution here is not to be found in notation software.
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This alone shows the worrying tendency in music education, or where it is heading.
If one writes for orchestras or ensembles with various acoustic instruments and expects notation software to cover the gap in general education then there is a big issue with the education system. Dorico developers cannot help here I am afraid.
For example: I am quite often writing chords for piano/cembalo/organ that are comfortably playable and player’s thumb presses 2 white keys . Very easy, no elbows or arms. 6 keys per hand, no sweat. Do we REALLY need Dorico to count to 5 for us? Or to 6? Do we really need the program to tell us about very hard-to-play trills with trumpet. Flute? What about different keying systems available for the same instrument as was mentioned for cor. angl.? I can name quite a few more of them.
Regarding Berlioz, Rimski-Korsakov etc.: they are nice BUT one has to consider that quite some instruments have evolved from that period. Adler/Blatter are quite adequate for modern ones. Nowadays also YOUTUBE: there are many players on extremely high professional level that cover and show the technical possibilities and limitations of their instruments. Whenever a very specific has risen I have found answers. Or just contact someone from nat. symphony orch. or nat. opera orch. Friendly people if they know/feel your full respect towards them.
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In a world of digital audio and virtual instruments, what is “unplayable” music?
If you’re writing music to be played by actual musicians and you don’t know what you’re doing, having software mask your lack of training is just going to blow up in your face eventually. You’re better off learning how to compose for each instrument so that you know it’s playable without an algorithm telling you.
If you’re writing music only to be played by virtual instruments in a DAW, why worry? Take advantage of the fact you can get sounds not even possible with real instruments and compose what you want to hear.
The feature you’re looking for would make more sense in a learning program that people use to get better at composing, not a professional program people use to make composing easier.
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There would be a lot of factors. For example:
- Pizz speed
- Possible slides on trombone
- Possible gliss on strings
- String slurs
- Multiple notes on strings
- Time needed to change from pizz to arco, and vice-versa
- Breathing on winds
- Time to change harp pedals, and avoiding buzzes
- Maximum notes and reach on harp
- Maximum notes and reach on piano
- Possible v impossible v difficult trills and tremolos
- Timpani retuning
- Speed in general
- Possible note combinations on harp
- Many more
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There’s one large problem with depending on a book to give you this kind of information: the book is very likely obsolete. Especially if it was written a couple of hundred years ago.
I used to use the Kent Kennan tome for all this kind of info, until one day I said to a performer that I would have done so-and-so if the instrument could do it, but that Kennan said it couldn’t. The performer laughed. “I can do it easily,” he said. “It’s been possible for at least twenty years on any decent instrument.”
So much for relying on books. What you need to do is show the music to an actual musician. They’ll tell you in a heartbeat.
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I should also probably add, tongue only part way into cheek, that writing music that is unlistenable is a bigger problem than writing music that is unplayable.
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The thing about orchestration books (of any vintage): following them will usually keep the composer within (relatively) safe limits, but to stretch the limits to virtuoso levels, one needs to talk to high-level players of the instruments themselves–ideally the specific player(s) one is writing the music for.
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I agree about books getting out of date, but Kennan is a great text. Rimsky-Korsakov and Berlioz-Strauss are ancient. Piston is solid and conservative but behind the times on woodwind developments. Still, better to err by playing it safe. Conductors and musicians won’t want to play your music if takes too much rehearsal. (Concertos are an exception.)
I am fortunate to have some friends who play in a major symphony. They have been very kind and helpful in reviewing passages that concerned me. I try not to take advantage and I only send very short sections once in a while.
UNLISTENABLE.
I might use this word in the title of something I will write in future. Great concept!
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And who decides what is “unlistenable”?
I, for one, find John Rutter’s music unlistenable.
Well, for me the most unlistenable composer I know is Anton Webern. And I happen to like Rutter. I was being facetious. I don’t expect everyone to have the same list.
Haha, again that is very difficult to define and completely subjective, and definitely no software or AI can help there!
As it happens my taste is exactly the opposite, I loath Rutter, and love (and am in awe for) Webern, so definitely not the same list!