Chick and Pete's orchestrations

["L. Bird" <pkeets@hotmail.com>]

I've been around to cdnow.com to check out Chick Corea's classical Grammy 
nomination.  For anyone who's familiar with his work, the cd includes an 
expanded and adapted SPAIN, and also a composition called CONCERTO FOR PIANO 
AND ORCHESTRA.

I decided to pass.  The description says it's a "modernist" piece, and the 
samples sound very abstract.  I like Corea's jazz work, but he seems to have 
turned out the same kind of random orchestration that McCartney did, and 
that Pete is also tending toward with his first couple of experiments.  I'm 
really wondering about how they produce these orchestrations.  There has to 
be something in the process that encourages "modernist" work.

All three of them have proved themselves to be solid composers with work 
that's not particularly "modernist" at all.  Actually, Pete's work may be be 
the most dissonant of the bunch, but I was just listening to Quad the Album, 
and he's done better orchestration there than with his recent classical 
efforts.  I seems like it would be just a matter of changing the voices from 
synthesizer and vocals to live instruments, but there must be some obstacle 
involved.

I don't think "modernist" or "abstract" is the way to go in classical right 
now.  Various composers pretty much ran that thread out some years ago.  
Stravinsky went about as far as was acceptable with dissonance and 
abstraction, and after that the audience dropped off in proportion.  There's 
been a big resurgance in popularity of classical type recordings with the 
success of the big movie composers, including Michael Kamen, John Williams 
and Danny Elfman--they really have a finger on how it should be done.  Pete 
really ought to fall into this category.

Think he needs to dump his software?


keets
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