Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
But they make this digital piano deals, that have like a million different variations, like you can have any type of piano you want, whether it's an upright, baby grand, 8 foot Steinway or even the CP-70 (blech!). You can get a tack piano simulation or even an out of tune saloon type piano sound. All of those in one little keyboard, or in the case of something like Arturia, one little software package. I think the Arturia even has "virtual" pianos that don't exist in real life, things like a glass piano, or one made out of steel or whatever.
It seems to me if you can do all that, it would be a simple matter to program something that will out you put any preparation on any string (say, wood or metal bolts or paper clips or whatever) and have something that will allow you to determine where on the string you're placing the preparation.
As for whether or not anyone who uses prepared piano in their music would use such a thing, I'm not so sure they wouldn't. To do actual prepared piano, you have to have, at the very least, a baby grand piano (upright pianos often times can't hold the preparations because the strings on the vertical axis instead of the horizontal). Unless you get to specify exactly which make and model you're using (which you probably won't because you're probably not Ray Charles or Elton John or Harry Connick Jr or someone else famous enough to get such riders in their contract), you may not be able to get exactly the sounds you want.
And even if you can get exactly the make and model you want, you still have to stand there and measure out the distance to where you want to put each preparation. That could take a lot of time by itself, depending on how precise you want things to be.
Well, "orchestration" just means picking which instrument plays which voice. It's the same thing Ravel did with Pictures At An Exhibition, which Modest Mussorgsky originally envisioned as a solo piano piece. Ravel took the sheet music, decades later, and basically assigned the parts to the various instruments. There are other instances of this happening.
Given the fact that Frank signed off on the whole project, I imagine Frank could have veto power on anything, he could have said, "Oh, that bit should be played by the flute instead of oboe" or whatever.
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