# Electronic Interpretation...



## hawk (Oct 1, 2007)

Hi All,
Hope your Holydays were all you hope for!
One of my Christmas gifts is a CD of Debussy's Tone Paintings by Tomita.
It is solo electronic performances of Debussys works. I listened for about 30 seconds then promptly removed it from the CD player. 
In all fairness I was somewhat biased to begin with as I do not care for electronica and of course there is no way to have an informed opinion after 30 seconds HOWEVER there seemed to be no warmth no soul to this interpretation. 
I have heard some say that the more precise the music(ian) the more robotic it sounds. I think no matter how precise the skills of a musician are there are those "human" moments in music that add to the warmth/richness of the music. Whether an orchestra or rock band or one person playing yidaki those "imperfect elements" that are sometimes present when playing such as string squeak or noticable inhalation add to the realness of the music. Kind of like the difference between analog recording and digital recording the latter often refered to as sterile.
Guess I am rambling a bit and if this makes anysense to you what are your opinions?


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## Ephemerid (Nov 30, 2007)

I've heard quite a bit of Tomita's work (including some of the Debussy interpretations). Certainly they do not "add up" to the real thing, but they are just interpretations no more than hearing Bach on piano (rather than harpsichord) or an arrangement of any piece of music for a different set of instruments. Tomita's work is interesting, but its not really my cup of tea either. 

I do agree with you to some degree on preciseness (as far as programming electronics goes) in that the human imperfections are lost. With Tomita, I believe a good deal of that is actually performed (I know he used to do live performances in the 70s-80s). I think the problem with synthesizers in general is that the sounds aren't as warm as good old fashioned acoustic instruments and so you have to work a lot harder just to get a more organic sound. So even if the synths are performed live (as in the case of Tomita), its still not very organic, just due to the limitations of the technology. 

The real Debussy is so much better of course!  

~josh

p.s. I am rather fond of digital recordings however-- improvements have been made in the technology since the 90s...


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