Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1990 - 60

Six weeks later, the musical director
rose from his seat in the dressing room,
brushed the dust from his D.]. and, in
response ro the call "Overture and
Beginners, please," made his way to the
pit. He had taken over from the accompanist in the final week of rehearsals,
taking note of all the little peculiarities
that found their way into any variety
show and noting that she had done most
of the programming necessary for the
smooth running of the show.
Bur it was now, with the audience
restless in their seats and that electric
first night sensation in the air, that his
moment of glory would come. Years of
keeping the music tight to the action
had served him in good stead when the
SWET/M.U. agreement had been abandoned in the late Eighties.
In the orchestra pit was the music
controller that would respond ro his
commands and the racks that held the
hundreds of musical instrument sound
samples that replaced the musicians.
Every instrument in the orchestra was
represented in those racks; they were
always in tune, they never complained
about he draught or the seating, they
didn't put in deps, they didn't turn up
with hangovers and, most important of

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all, they didn't talk back. There was even
a HeavenlY Choir that didn't need dressing room' space, nor did it have affairs
wi th itself and conduct savagely whispered conversations in the wings.
True, there were a few disadvantages: The sound was still rather stilted
and artificial, but people had got used to
that through constant exposure to popular music, and now that the major
orchestras had been disbanded, very few
members of the public actually knew
what real instruments looked like, let
alone sounded like. Keeping time with
the live act on stage had been amajor
problem for a while, wirh the performer
having to follow the rigid tempi produced by the electronics: that had been
solved bv the first of a series of inventions in this field, the MIDI baton.
Connected to the Musical Instrument Digital Interface of the system
controller by an infra-red link, the 1IDI
baron used miniature motion sensors
and accelerometers to control the replay
tempo and dynamic of the system. The
early models had needed careful handling, and more than one M.D. with a
flamboyant right hand had come to grief
in a most spectacular way with songs
speeding up and slowing down at ran-

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58

1990 FAll

TD&T

dom. The second invention was one that
he found extremely useful in variety, particularlv for comics and acrobats whose
acts ha;dly ever ran to fixed patterns.
Ducking inro the pit, he did his
pre-show drill: checking that all the statuS lights showed green and that the
backup computer was tagging the main
performance machine. The twO ran in
tandem with multiple redundancy the
norm on each machine, so it would have
to be something pretty catastrophic to
halt his end of the show. Even the power
supplies were battery backed, and would
carry the system for 90 minutes. This
was all academic, of course, as in the
event of a power failure nothing else
would work, and he would be reduced
to producing cheerful music until the
technicians could fix the fault.
He loaded the tWO compact discs
into their player for the bottom-of-thebill act who couldn't afford the services
of the computer programmer/arranger
and had to rely on off-the-shelf backing
tracks; glanced through the running
order on the VDU; acknowledged the
cue light from corner, the applause from
the audience; raised his baron, and
dropped the system in with a tap on the
foot-switch.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1990
