Another musician whose among my favorites is Pat Metheny. You can read about his latest project here:
Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans, his tousled mane tucked under a
baseball cap, Mr. Metheny stood before a 14-foot-high, 35-foot-wide
wall festooned with musical instruments: an imposing, circuit-wired
one-man band. The contraption itself seemed byzantine, all the more so
when it sprang to life in a mechanical whirl: beaters tapping cymbals,
levers gliding over strings, mallets cascading across a vibraphone.
Mr.
Metheny closed his eyes and hunched over his guitar, bringing a human
touch to “Expansion,” the centerpiece of his new album, “Orchestrion”
(Nonesuch). With its shifting tonal center and fluttering groove, the
tune combined aspects of post-Coltrane jazz and Brazilian pop with
cinematic breadth. So beyond the obvious technical feat — thousands of
moving parts, executing a programmed score — the performance dazzled on
a basic level. Mr. Metheny and the unmanned orchestra were making his
kind of music.
I was skeptical at first, but here's what made me a believer:
What complicated the assignment was Mr. Metheny’s high standard for
dynamics. Each instrument needed to be not only hair-trigger responsive
to his signals but also capable of a range of volume. The robots
receive their orders from Mr. Metheny’s computer, on which he runs two
different software programs — or, no less effectively, from his guitar
or keyboard. (He said he plans to incorporate some robotic free
improvisation on the tour, as a counterweight to his intricately
plotted compositions.)
In the end Lemur created most but not all
of the rig. Mr. Herbert provided at least one solenoid guitar, while
Ken Caulkins, who has done animatronics work for Disneyland,
made some pneumatic pieces, including an electric bass. A Chicago pipe
organ company created two cabinets filled with jugs and bottles, to be
played with blasts of air.
“Everything came in months late,” Mr.
Metheny said of the instruments, which began arriving last March, along
with a daunting challenge. “There’s some hardcore technical reasons why
most mechanical music doesn’t groove that hard,” he said. “And I
thought, ‘Man, if it should be able to do anything, it should be able
to do that.’ So one of my first tasks was to go through, solenoid by
solenoid, and find out how each one felt the beat. And then figuring
out software compensations for that latency. That took weeks.”
That's precisely why I can't stand conventional player pianos: zero dynamic range. Seems like that problem is fixed here.
Recent Comments