According to a recent New York Times article, the Broadway theater community is struggling with increasing pressure to use software packages such as Notion, Sinfonia, OrchExtra, and InstrumentalEase as supplements to pit orchestras. These programs are designed not purely as Karaoke arrangements for live singers, but as customizable tools giving conductors the ability to mix an available retinue of live musicians with the accompaniment necessary to simulate the sound of a larger orchestra. In practice, these platforms provide theater companies with limited funding, manpower, or space with the ability to replicate the fuller sound of orchestras unbound by lack of means.
The dispute, of course, arises because if you can replace three of your violinists with tracks on a laptop computer, why not replace them all? And the rest of the band, too? A machine is cheaper, more reliable, less cranky, easier to carry, and takes up less space than your average musician, offering many ways to boost a company’s bottom line. The musicians’ union has opposed the introduction of such digital music into the concert hall since it could touch off a slide down a slippery slope. In part, the rhetoric is that the theatergoer is paying to hear live music, and the introduction of computers into the theater will lead to a gradual degeneration of musical skill and appreciation. Of course, the primary goal is to defend musicians from their own anachronism.
John Philip Sousa would not have been surprised by this turn of affairs. In 1906 he wrote a polemic against the infiltration of Victorian-era mechanical music like nickelodeons, player pianos, and the phonograph into spaces formerly reserved as the province of musicians. Though his argument is for the protection of the composer’s copyright, he sensed that the age had placed traditional means of music creation on shaky footing.
I foresee a marked deterioration in American Music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines. When I add to this that I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights in our own work, I but offer a second reason why the facts and conditions should be made clear to everyone, alike in the interest of musical art and of fair play.
The first half of Sousa’s treatise argues that machines undermine the traditional participatory nature of musical production, threatening to open an unbridgeable void between the musically illiterate and the professional. By the time one finishes his essay, however, one senses that Sousa’s primary fear is a change in the economics of music production and consumption. In his 1977 critique of the political economy of music, Jacques Attali expounded upon the shift in musical culture from one based on community and participation to one of commodity and consumption. Mechanization of music in the late nineteenth century played a critical role in this turn of affairs, and today our ravenous tendency to "stockpile" CDs and mp3s bears witness to the transformation of music from experience to be enjoyed into object to be owned.
Broadway musicals exist somewhere in the gap between experience and object, since the experience of the theatrical spectacle is itself an object to be consumed. We buy entertainment when we go to the theater. We purchase the experience of traveling to Midtown, knowing that we are witnessing BROADWAY, an avenue of dreams that in our collective imagination transcends any physical location on a map. When Broadway goes on the road, the ersatz experience of New York City is the allure, with all of its populist glitz and glamour. When high school students develop their own productions of Broadway standards, they participate in and recreate the dream.
Though a part of making that experience, and despite the undeniable talent that musicians bring to it, it is not music but the flawless spectacle of the production that draws an audience to Broadway. Burying the contributions of individual musicians in an anonymous “pit,” the spectacle of the Broadway show depersonalizes sound even in the most musician-friendly productions, often technologically amplifying their performance through modern electronic sound systems. Mediated in this way, the sound is more like film, television, or other media that conceal the performance of music. Broadway focuses attention on stage actors and singers, unlike purely instrumental orchestral music, which foregrounds the orchestra itself as the star of the show. I cannot prove it, but perhaps the musical is more popular than pure instrumental music because the focus of our attention is on the actors on the stage, and we sympathize with their presence and the immediacy of their voices. Even this component of the show, however, is often processed through a p.a. system, on which the spectacle of Broadway seems to depend these days.
Obviously, musical technology was anything but a fad. And one cannot help but feel sympathy for talented and dedicated artists whose livelihood could end up being under threat in the same way that craftsmen, autoworkers, and New York City subway token clerks have watched their jobs outsourced to machines. One even hopes that they will win. There is some irony, though, in the aesthetic argument that adding a few tracks of recorded music to a live musical performance removes some indispensable element from the Broadway experience. Most of our experience with popular music today is with recordings built of individual tracks, assembled together to present the illusion of an idealized human performance. As perhaps the most elaborate expression of American popular music, the Broadway musical may finally be catching up to the world it helped create.
