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Post by Timeblue on Apr 10, 2019 12:25:36 GMT
If you put for example,Eldorado Overture to a classical music expert without telling them who it was by, what would be their reaction do you think? Would it be dismissed as amateurish or would it stand up as good music?
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Post by tremblinwilbury on Apr 10, 2019 12:54:55 GMT
Oooo... good point, Mr Blue
By coincidence I was listening to the 2001 reissue on my way to work yesterday morning, and really enjoyed the instrumental suite that was included as one of the extras. And, if my memory serves me right, it was the New Year's Eve gig at The Point in Dublin, in 1996, where Mr Clark conducted the RTÉ Concert Orchestra* performing said overture.
*The Concert orchestra was previously known as the RTÉLO - The RTÉ Light Orchestra.
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Post by unomusette on Apr 10, 2019 21:34:32 GMT
I used to wonder that about The Battle of Marston Moor. But not for long.
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Post by Timeblue on Apr 10, 2019 21:54:11 GMT
This is Louis with The English Pops Orchestra from a few years back and if you take out the drums,you could (to my untrained ears) be listening to a piece of music from one of the classical greats like Tchaikovsky....
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Post by Helmut83 on Apr 10, 2019 22:14:15 GMT
It's an interesting question, Timeblue . I have also wondered how well would ELO's pieces of classical music would be rated among classical music lovers, but to know the answer we'd have to have sort of an expert in classical music.
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Post by johnr on Apr 10, 2019 22:36:35 GMT
its not particularly the music itself, its the orchestral arrangement, as much an art as the songwriting, a good orhestral arranger will get 50 musicians to all play different tunes so that togethr they sound like the original, its bafflingly complicated and a poor arrangement will make beethoven sound like bros, whereas a good one will make bros sound like beethoven, its more than just the tunes themselves, its the complex mix of orchestral instrumentation. i cant think of anything more musically complex than transcribing a score from the original draft to the orchestral arrangement.
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Post by StrangeMagic on Apr 11, 2019 0:11:41 GMT
its not particularly the music itself, its the orchestral arrangement, as much an art as the songwriting, a good orhestral arranger will get 50 musicians to all play different tunes so that togethr they sound like the original, its bafflingly complicated and a poor arrangement will make beethoven sound like bros, whereas a good one will make bros sound like beethoven, its more than just the tunes themselves, its the complex mix of orchestral instrumentation. i cant think of anything more musically complex than transcribing a score from the original draft to the orchestral arrangement. An orchestral arrangement is the music written out for each instrument, correct? So if you have eight violins, six cellos, four double basses, three French horns, two tympani, a triangle, and bass drum, and each one is playing something different, the "orchestral arrangement would consist of twenty-five individual scores for each instrument. I don't know what bass drum music looks like. Something like BAM BAM wait wait BAM BAM wait. No, just joking. Someone who has a clue please tell me. If four of the violins played the same thing, you'd be down to twenty-two scores because the four violins could play the same score. As I understand it from what Richard has said, Jeff, Richard, and Louis developed the orchestral arrangements together, and Louis transcribed them. I've transcribed music before, although for guitar and piano, not for a whole orchestra. I didn't find it complex, just painstaking, time-consuming, and laborious. I think the complex part is developing the musical arrangement itself, not writing down the notes.
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Post by johnr on Apr 11, 2019 0:53:36 GMT
yeah, but if youve a principal violinist then thats a slightly different score and repeat for every instrument. its like guitars, youve lead, bass, rhythm etc etc. every musician is playing the same tune, but slightly different.
take the eldorado overture above, same tune but the orchestration means it can be done very well, or, very badly.....
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Post by Grroosss on Apr 11, 2019 5:15:24 GMT
Well, I’m not sure what some snooty classical composer might have to say about ELO’s classical pieces, but I’ve had the opportunity to play quite a bit of highly-regarded music in an orchestra—including famous works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Brahms, Mozart, Shostakovich, etc; Phantom of the Opera, West Side Story, and multiple Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals; and several movie soundtracks by John Williams, as well as others like Alan Silvestri and Michael Giacchino—and in my eyes, an ELO piece would be just as complex and challenging, and would feel right at home among them.
I can certainly attest to the fact that an arrangement can make or break a piece. An arranger may adapt a piece to make it more suitable for different sizes of ensembles, different instrumentations, or different skill levels, and sometimes you end up with arrangements that are just awful: a rhythm doesn’t sound quite right or has been over-simplified, the piece is in an odd key to accommodate for other instruments or to make it easier, a particular melody was given to a bad choice of instrument, or the notes/chords in certain places just sound nothing like the original. I haven’t tried my hand at composing or arranging, but it certainly seems to me that the more instruments playing different parts you add, the more difficult it becomes, especially as oftentimes the parts played by different instruments are drastically different rather than being variations on a single melody.
Just a bit of clarification of musical lingo—the “orchestral arrangement” would refer to the combination of all of the parts assigned to the different instruments in the ensemble. The “score” is what the conductor of the orchestra reads from, and contains all of the parts of the different instruments, lined up phrase by phrase so that the conductor can see all of them at once. A “part” refers to what the individual musicians are playing, and only the part for their instrument will appear on the sheet music that they read from. Usually there is more than one part written for each instrument, so some of the musicians will be playing harmonies or altogether different musical lines—for example, 1st violin and 2nd violin—but I’ve never seen more than 3 distinct parts for a certain instrument. Sometimes certain passages in one part will be divided into two sets of notes, and some of the musicians playing that part will choose to play one set of the notes and the other musicians playing that part will play the other set of notes, but this is as diverse as the different notes and rhythms will get for a certain instrument. A principal violinist or a soloist on another instrument generally plays the same part as other musicians; the solo will be written into the part, it’s just that everybody else playing that part knows to stop playing when they reach the solo, or will have a divided set of notes similar to what I described before.
And for anyone who’s curious... bass drum and other percussion music is often written on a staff with only one line instead of the five lines that tonal instruments use, and notes sometimes have an X for the note head instead of the small ovals that everyone is familiar with. Rests are denoted by the same symbols that other instruments use.
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Post by tremblinwilbury on Apr 11, 2019 7:17:55 GMT
To be honest, there isn't one definition of 'classical' music. One 'piece' played regularly on Classic FM, here in the UK, is the the theme from The Magnificent Seven. Indeed, film music might be seen as today's classical.
Eldorado does fit the bill. So does Fire On High.
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Post by Timeblue on Apr 11, 2019 9:10:37 GMT
Could you imagine the scene where every violinist and cellist from ELOs history (and even the French horns) got together on stage at the same time! Now THAT would be an orchestra!!!!
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Post by jackpunch on Apr 11, 2019 11:53:10 GMT
its not particularly the music itself, its the orchestral arrangement, as much an art as the songwriting, a good orhestral arranger will get 50 musicians to all play different tunes so that togethr they sound like the original, its bafflingly complicated and a poor arrangement will make beethoven sound like bros, whereas a good one will make bros sound like beethoven, its more than just the tunes themselves, its the complex mix of orchestral instrumentation. i cant think of anything more musically complex than transcribing a score from the original draft to the orchestral arrangement. An orchestral arrangement is the music written out for each instrument, correct? So if you have eight violins, six cellos, four double basses, three French horns, two tympani, a triangle, and bass drum, and each one is playing something different, the "orchestral arrangement would consist of twenty-five individual scores for each instrument. I don't know what bass drum music looks like. Something like BAM BAM wait wait BAM BAM wait. No, just joking. Someone who has a clue please tell me. If four of the violins played the same thing, you'd be down to twenty-two scores because the four violins could play the same score. As I understand it from what Richard has said, Jeff, Richard, and Louis developed the orchestral arrangements together, and Louis transcribed them. I've transcribed music before, although for guitar and piano, not for a whole orchestra. I didn't find it complex, just painstaking, time-consuming, and laborious. I think the complex part is developing the musical arrangement itself, not writing down the notes. Generally speaking orchestras have multiples playing the string parts - so you might get 4 violins playing one part, 4 violins playing the second line, 4 violas, 4 cellos, 4 DBs etc. That's cos once the brass get involved it's complete and utter carnage. Get a few trombones and trumpets giving it six nowt and to be honest, everyone else might as well pack up and go to the bar. In terms of whether an ELO composition would stand up against some classical stuff, johnr is absolutely spot on. All depends on the quality of the arrangement. I do think that the classical side of ELO changed massively once LC was brought on board, although personally I prefer the rather minimalist efforts of Rainer Pietsch on Time. I suspect that when it comes to how JL, LC and RT used to do stuff, my guess is JL would suggest an idea and probably sing it, get RT to play it on piano and agree chord structures and LC would develop and orchestrate. I don't think that JL or RT would have any idea around the range of any of the instruments or how to "blend" an orchestral sound to be honest, so I reckon that LC did a lot more than just transcribe. My problem with pop music being played by orchestras is that pop melodies/harmonies are rarely strong enough. Pop music by nature is usually very simple and quite repetitive in melodic style (often 2 or 4 bar phrase repeated)- without the lyrics the tunes can become a bit dull. Best bit of orchestration/development of a pop song I think is the extended version of Nights in White Satin which Peter Knight wrote.
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Post by StrangeMagic on Apr 12, 2019 1:53:20 GMT
<snip> I suspect that when it comes to how JL, LC and RT used to do stuff, my guess is JL would suggest an idea and probably sing it, get RT to play it on piano and agree chord structures and LC would develop and orchestrate. I don't think that JL or RT would have any idea around the range of any of the instruments or how to "blend" an orchestral sound to be honest, so I reckon that LC did a lot more than just transcribe. <snip> We have a good idea of how Jeff, Richard, and Louis worked together, thanks to this 1994 interview with Richard. You aren't far wrong, except you may give too much weight to Lou in the creative process, as do many people. He did have a part in it, but not as large a part as Jeff and Richard. I'll grant Lou had more knowledge of the capabilities of the orchestral instruments in the beginning and could suggest appropriate "riffs" for them. I don't think it took Jeff long to catch up. groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.music.elo/iFrq-LGBrYA Were the keyboard duties that you and Jeff shared a 50-50 deal or did you > do most of the keyboard work? This varied a lot over the years. At the start, I probably did most of the keyboards, but as recording techniques changed and synthesisers and electronics came into the picture, Jeff did more and more. For example, when we recorded On The Third Day, most of the tracks were started with Bev, Mike and myself, in the studio, and Jeff in the control room. By the time we got to Balance of Power, the usual way was to have a stack of keyboards in the control room, and me and Jeff playing along to a drum track, and Bev adding his things later. <snip> When we started using a full orchestra, things changed. An early part of the process was to get the arrangements for the full orchestra, which normally involved me sitting down with Jeff and Lou Clark. I would play the tunes through on the piano, Jeff would suggest riffs and things, and Lou would write them down, then Lou would say "How about some of this", and I would say "What about a one of them", and so the string arrangements came about. We next heard them when we got to the studio and the orchestra was running through them. That was quite an experience. In the meantime, the rhythm tracks would have been laid down as before, with the emphasis more on simplicity, so as to leave space for the orchestral parts.
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Post by queenofthehours on Apr 12, 2019 14:48:13 GMT
I think ELO's orchestrations are as good an anything seriously classical - or at least what Classic FM considers classical, ELO is certainly more classical for me than movie theme tunes.
Radio 3 is another matter (although I have heard shows on there where 'The Battle of Marston Moor' would be considered genius) as it's a more serious station yet I can hear elements in ELO scores - even the guitar and drum parts - that could be straight out of any of the great composer's symphonies.
For ten years before coming to ELO I listened to nothing but classical music, I thought I'd never listen to rock music again and I'm certain it was the classical elements that got me really interested in ELO's music. Classical orchestrations of rock songs are a different matter. I've heard some really good ones and some really awful ones. I don't know if the idea works all the time but sometimes it can be magical - it probably depends on the quality of the original song to begin with.
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Post by Timeblue on Apr 12, 2019 23:19:13 GMT
I said at the start,what would a classical expert think of ELOs music but what do you think the GREATs would have said? I can imagine Handel saying to Vivaldi in a coffee shop somewhere in Bavaria "those young upstarts Lynne,Tandy and Clark from England are trying to muscle their way into our music! it won't last....." (I won't write this quote in a Germanic tone as not to upset our European fans..)
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