Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510100022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Whether it's the tortured genius Beethoven engaged in a titanic struggle with his muse, or Mozart effortlessly pouring forth a quicksilver stream of notes, the one thing they both needed was pen and paper. No matter how good they were at imagining and perfecting music in their heads, eventually it had to be transformed into those funny little ink patterns in a composition book.
A composer's pen and sketchbook hung on for a lot longer than Mozart's ruffles and laces, but Jim Sochinski of Virginia Tech says such equipment is beginning to be as passe as patronage from the local prince.
Sochinski, who is a composer, professor of music at Virginia Tech and bass trombonist for the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, now composes exclusively on computer.
He uses a program called Composer's Mosaic, written by a firm called Mark of the Unicorn. It's part of a suite of software purchased by the Virginia Tech music department for use by its teachers. Sochinski said the program has made an immense difference both in his working habits and in the ease with which a musical conception can be transferred from his head to paper. The musician is a widely published composer, with a series of fanfares commissioned by the Roanoke Symphony, a work for band premiered in Portugal in 1992, and many other arrangements and compositions over the past decade.
"The things you can do are simply amazing," he said. "You can augment chords, change rhythms, transpose, do retrogrades, you can invert the intervals - and this can all be done instantaneously at the click of a mouse button.''
The program has made the physical effort of composition so easy, in fact, that Sochinski says he has to be vigilant that the computer itself doesn't alter his compositional style.
"You have to be on guard all the time to make sure that the technology doesn't become a silent partner with you. The metaphor would be word processing, the cutting and pasting. You write a four-bar phrase, it sounds good, and it's very beguiling just to copy that four-bar phrase again as is later on. You have to continually ask yourself, `Did I make this musical decision because of the music, or did I make that decision because it was convenient?'"
But it's not just the physical labor involved in writing, erasing and revising that's been dramatically reduced. Say you've been commissioned to write a work for a clarinet soloist in another country. Sochinski and the rest of the Tech music department use another Mark of the Unicorn product called Performer, which allows them actually to hear the notes they've just written.
And if there's some doubt whether the solo part lays idiomatically on the instrument's fingerboard, the music can be zipped down a telephone line via modem so your intended performer can both view the score and hear an approximation of how the passage would sound - as long as he has the same software. In fact, the soloist can incorporate suggestions by manipulating the file on his end, and then instantly ship the revised sample back by phone line.
Composition is only a part of Sochinski's professional life; much of the rest is consumed by teaching and preparing to teach. And computer technology is powering a similar revolution in pedagogy, said the musician.
"When you're teaching a work to a roomful of students, for example, you can use notation software to display the score while it's being played. The score for `The Magic Flute' will be scrolling across the screen as the actual music plays. You can stop it and talk at any time - it's a powerful teaching tool," said Sochinski.
The bottom line: "I'm able to deliver more information, more dramatically and in a shorter period of time."
The trombonist credits Tech music department chairman John Husser with having conceived the state-of-the-art music classroom, which is the same Squires Recital Salon where concerts are held at other times.
A scrolling opera score accompanied by digitized music is a sexy use of computer technology, but the computer revolution is affecting more mundane kinds of teaching, too.
Ear training, for example. Ear training means teaching future musicians how to recognize various musical intervals and chord patterns by ear, and it used to be done the hard way, with a roomful of students listening to a professor actually make the sounds on a piano.
"These days we are using ear training software that was written at the University of Wisconsin. It's self-paced, and students work in the lab downstairs in the music wing," said Sochinski. The software drills students for as long as they need to recognize a given interval or chord, administers a test, and then moves on to the next topic - all without requiring the presence of a faculty member.
For all the advantages of computer technology in music, it has drawbacks as well. One may not be felt for decades, until future musicologists try to follow the development of a major composer who wrote on computer. Old-fashioned music notebooks, filled with false starts and dead ends, allow scholars to trace a composer's development - today's music software doesn't provide similar clues for researchers.
"And there's a downside to the pedagogy, too. The first time you do this, for each 50-minute lecture I would say that you're spending anywhere from six to 12 hours in preparation. Of course, that's amortised over the years following that, but it's a big investment at the beginning," said Sochinski.
Online readers with World Wide Web access may check into the latest developments at the intersection of music and computer technology and leave mail for Sochinski at the Virginia Tech Music Department's home page at http://www.music.vt.edu/.
by CNB