Insights and Tips from David Fletcher owner/operator/musician
Five Secrets about Live Music
1. Live music can be lively without being loud…. How many events have you attended where guests complained that they “couldn’t talk above the music…” There are a few ways you can insure this never happens at your events.
Consider using all acoustic ensembles. Here is one example: note this is lively, yet with absolutely no electronics. All acoustic ensembles also expand the choices for music placement. The musicians can be anywhere, not just near electric outlets. Any style, including dance music, can be presented without amps.
For a bit more volume without over powering the room another option is to use only battery amps. This keeps the volume relatively low, and also allows you to place musicians anywhere.
Five secrets most event planners don’t know.
2. Music has Colors. Your guests experience events with all their senses - taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. Some composers believed that each key has a corresponding color. Beethoven called B minor the black key. Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov pegged D major as yellow. Here is some more information:
If you listen carefully to their compositions in these keys, you might agree. The best events have a consistent theme that appeals to all the senses. What color is your event?
3. Music can inspire.
“If I can write the songs of a nation, I care not who writes the laws” Plato
“An ounce of passion is worth a pound of reason” Thomas Paine.
Music can determine the emotional response and memory of your guests to the event, even an educational or business meeting. The retail industry has spent millions in determining what music will keep customers in a store, what sound track will cause them to spend more or less money, or what will cause them to move around. Conversely, Penn Station and other public facilities play classical music because they have learned this will discourage loitering by adolescents. The 7 – 11 stores have taken this perhaps too far by playing a highpitched squeal outside their stores that is only audible to young people and dogs. How will the soundtrack of your event influence your guests?
4. “Period” music should be historically accurate. The most famous literary anachronism is the line in Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar “the clock struck three….” Obviously in Ceasar’s time there weren’t clocks that struck anything! One of my former employees is now the gun specialist for the history channel. He has observed that movies westerns too often include guns that weren’t invented until 50, sometimes 100 years, after the time depicted. There are specific stylistic elements, practices, norms that fit different music periods. There is for example a difference in the harmonic structure between music of the 20’s, and 40’s. Your guests will appreciate your efforts to be historically and stylistically accurate when presenting “period” music.
5. Analog vs Digital/Actual vs. Virtual
Sadly Most music you are now hearing is at its least passionate level in history. It is like eating engineered tomatoes. Here is why-
Music presentation went from live (pre historic until 1877 Edison first phonograph ) to then vinyl ( 78’s 45’s 33’s) then to CD (early 80’s.. first cd players were $3000! ) finally to mp3’,ipod, you tube. Each technical advance has diluted the authentic sound quality. What you listen to today has been losing “edge” for the last 50 years. When you hear live music you will immediately hear, feel and see the difference.
At every opportunity technology/the bottom line - robbed, stole, took away, reduced – fidelity. Fidelity:
fidelity |fəˈdelətē|
noun
faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support : he sought only the strictest fidelity to justice.
• faithfulness to a spouse or partner.
• the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced : the 1949 recording provides reasonable fidelity.