Music by Mouse and MIDI |
by Tom Meijer. Translation: Hans van Oost Until about six years ago music markers did their work exactly as their colleagues did about 100 years ago. They marked transverse and longitudinal lines to establish the position of the holes. Then these holes were punched through both the arrangement and the cardboard by a foot-operated machine. This was both a trade and a very time-consuming way of working. In the meantime, here too the modernisation has ....... The modern music-marker makes his arrangements from behind his computer. Pencil, India rubber and paper have been replaced by mouse, keyboard and monitor. Certainly you will have had a look at the rear side of a mechanical organ and have watched the music book run through the keyframe. The keys jump up through the holes in the cardboard which cause the pipes or drums to play. At the blank start of the book all keys are pressed down and no music is playing. A hole appears; a note sounds. At the end of the hole the note ceases to sound. The duration of the note is determined by the length of the hole. More holes simultaneously means more notes sounding together and, like a pianist knows where the treble and bass notes are on his piano keyboard, the music marker knows which keys he has to use in order to bring the right notes into play. Marking music seems an easy job and, for a part, it actually is. But the real art does not ly in drawing the lines. Most important is to make a well-sounding musical arrangement. Most organ factories used to have a music-marking division with two classes of experts. First a professional musician made an arrangement which would fit the organ. He wrote that down in normal musical writing, including all ...., counter voices, registration, and drums. Then this sheet music passed to the music marker, who translated the score to the typical notation of the music book. It was a scrupulous job in which mistakes were not allowed. Later music markers combined both skills. They made their arrangements while they were marking their lines directly on the paper or even on the cardboard book. They could hear the music playing while they were working. When the computer made its entry in the nineteen-eighties it did not yet look as if it would ease the work of the music-marker. This changed when programs were made with which music could be filed and edited. The magic word was MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). This is a smart technique with which is became possible to play music by computer via a sound card or external synthesizer. In a MIDI-file every note is described by a number of parameters, with as most important ones:
A graphical reproduction of these parameters looks like the pattern of rectangular holes in an organ book and a little like those in a piano roll. The program makers justly called this reproduction "Piano Roll View". It is not a statical view; the music pattern is scrolling over the screen from right to left while the music is playing (in some programs the direction is top to bottom, like a real piano roll); WYSIWYH! The first programs which were equipped with this Piano Roll View came around 1994 with names as Cubase and Cakewalk. The Belgian music marker Tony Decap from Herentals found out a way to mark and play back music for mechanical organs. His ideas were followed soon. It needed getting used to, but after a few weeks practice every music marker could work from the screen the same way as he used to work before with a paper or cardboard strip. The possibilities of the computer seem to be without limits. The arranger clicks his mouse on the screen to add new notes or to remove unwanted ones. Notes can also be made longer or shorter, or they can be towed to another position. The bar lines are already there and the ... can be chosen. Repetitions are easy; just copy and paste. Transposition of the whole piece is a matter of a few mouse clicks. Even the tempo can be changed within every measure, which makes it easy to play the music in a natural tempo (this was very difficult in the old methods). A special feature is that the computer can play the piece without being punched into cardboard or paper. While music markers in the past only could try to imagine how their work would sound later, his modern colleague can hear instantly what he has done. Once the arrangement is finished, the music marker can go several ways with his digitally recorded file. He can print the notes on a roll of paper, to be punched later in the classic way. A faster and easier method is to feed the MIDI-file from a computer into an automatic punch machine. The completed book rolls out of this machine with about seven metres per minute, which is more than twice the playing speed. Even faster and easier is to skip the book altogether. New organs have been built lately with a MIDI-interface instead of a key frame. These organs can play the music directly from a disk. Not only book music is being made with computer aid. Paper rolls for mechanical pianos and orchestrions can be marked on the computer screen and punched automatically by a machine. It is even possible to play the music real-time on a keyboard and make additions and changes later in "piano Roll View". Another way to make MIDI-files is to connect a special reading machine to the computer, which translates the holes pattern of an existing book or roll to a MIDI-file. In this way it is possible to listen to old arrangements again, even when the instruments themselves have ceased to exist! Computers are handy tools to mark music, to establish the place, forms and sequence of the musical notes. The computer can not help you with one thing, however: to write down a well-sounding musical arrangement. While a text editor will not make a great writer out of you, buying a computer will not make you a virtuoso musician! Writing music is, and will always be, a matter of knowledge, creativity, practice and experience. In making arrangements for mechanical organs it is also important for you to know something about the technical aspects of these machines, and something about the sound of the various pipe registers. Furthermore you have to know exactly which are the musical possibilities of the organ. These are often limited, because organ builders often omitted certain notes from the scale in order to save space (and money). The smallest type of street organs f.i. have only three bass notes and they lack almost all flats and sharps. Gerard Razenberg, famous music marker for street organs, once remarked: "Arranging for such a limited instrument is like typing on a machine which lacks the b, j, k and t. You never can write down the words you mean". Arranging book music remains a specialized job, despite of the comfort of a computer. Employed in a responsible way it saves a lot of dull and monotonous work. It provides freedom to take out experiments, because the music can be played back per measure or passage, and corrected afterwards. Something will be lost of course: the exiting moment when the completed organ book can be played for the first time, without preliminary control. Thanks heaven the sound quality of a computer is not nearly that of the real street, dance hall, or fairground organ. This way the surprise remains how the arrangement will sound in the end. Of course the new way of working has its own disadvantages. It is relatively easy to translate an existing musical arrangement from one organ to the other. But that does not mean that the result will sound good and just. Arrangements which are made for a Belgian dance hall organ are not fit for a German fairground organ. Still these things happen! Another danger is that computers with disks will eventually replace the classic keyframe with the cardboard book music. It has some practical advantages: no dragging about heavy books, new music can be purchased faster and cheaper, and the repertoire can be chosen by means of a remote control like a TV set. However, in this way the classical technics get lost, and the organ has nothing to show at its rear side anymore. A cardboard book with holes in it is more imaginative than a floppy disk! Some people don’t like this modernisation at all; they stick to the old handiwork. Sure, the pencil and paper puzzle had its charms, but who is still washing clothes with a tub and wringer? And... maybe the computer will stimulate younger people to wage their luck to arranging for mechanical organs or other MM instruments.
This article was published before in the magazine van Speelklok tot Pierement nr 47 of December 2000. |