The New Yok Times of Sunday, March 25 reports that many musical productions now have few live musicians in the orchestra pit, many parts having been supplanted by sound libraries. This is not as prevalent in New Yawk, where the musician's union has contracts mandating a minimum number of live musicians, but it is increasingly popular in off-Broadway and amateur productions.
The way it works is this: for $1,400 your school or community theater rents a notebook computer from
Music Theatre International that comes with the musical of your choice already loaded. If your group of musicians already has a clarinet or saxophone, you simply mute that part in the software's playback. In this way the stage cast can sing to a combination of live musicians and recorded sound-library.
What kind of laptop computer, you ask? Why, a MacBook Pro, of course!
Another piece of software which replaces live musicians is
Notion, ($600 for just the software; not available for Windows Vista) and it is important to remember that these programs are not merely recordings of various ballets and musicals. In
Notion, the computer player follows the conductor's tempo by tapping the beat on any key in the ASDFGHJKL row of the keyboard.
There y'go. The trouble with Windows is that it's a good operating system, but you just can't find any useful software for it.
