The Fauxharmonic Orchestra

This is what Paul Henry Smith says you’ll see when you come to hear him conduct Beethoven tonight at the Holy Name Parish in West Roxbury.

“A beautiful church, four strange conical-looking speakers and me,” he said. “You’ll hear Beethoven’s first symphony, among other works, for the first time ever in this configuration.”

What you won’t see is a stage full of musicians. The Brookline-based conductor will lead what he calls the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, two computers with millions of prerecorded sounds and some top-of-the-line Bang & Olufsen speakers. Instead of a baton, Smith uses a modified Nintendo Wii game controller while standing on a pressure-sensitive platform.

“If I lean toward where the phantom violins would be, it sends a signal to the computer to make the first violins louder,” Smith, 45, said. “If I lean toward the cellos and basses, it brings the cellos and basses up.”

Smith expects audiences will be shocked by the resulting sound.

“This is not plinky-plunky computer-playing music,” he said. “This is beautiful sound in a beautiful space, an extremely expressive performance, meticulously crafted and left open for spontaneity.”

For Smith, who studied under Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood in the early ’80s, this is just the start. He plans to play all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies with the Fauxharmonic at the Holy Name by the end of next year.

Digital orchestras have become increasingly common in film scores in the past five years, says Smith, but not on the concert stage.

“I’m excited to share this in a concert hall,” he said. “That’s where the magic happens.”

Is this the future of classical music?

“It’s radical for the classical music community,” said John Mallia, director of the electronic music studio at Boston’s New England Conservatory. “If (Smith)takes some risks and does more exaggerated things, it could be really interesting. Those loudspeakers (Beolab 5s) are really pristine, in and of itself.”

Paul Henry Smith and his Fauxharmonic Orchestra play the Holy Name Church tonight.

In addition to Beethoven, Smith’s Fauxharmonic Orchestra will accompany soprano Tynan Davis in two arias from an opera-in-progress by Tom Myron. and violist Noralee Walker in Paul Hindemith’s “Trauermusik.”

“The lifeblood (for orchestral music) is a continual flow of new ideas for composers,” Smith said. “It’s much easier for a composer’s work to get heard with a digital orchestra than a physical orchestra. It’s purely economics at that level.

“I think digital composers will find a way to use digital orchestras in a way traditional orchestras can’t play,” he continued. “Now we’re at a point where it’s imitating (live) orchestras, but that’s not going to go on forever. As composers figure out how they can do things with digital, it will evolve as a different branch. It won’t be a question of digital or acoustic, it will be enlarging the power of music.”
- Boston Herald

Wii would like to play. Beethoven.

Using controllers from the popular Nintendo Wii video game as a cellist would wield a bow or a maestro a baton, Brookline's Paul Henry Smith presents what's billed as the world's first live digital orchestra performance of a Beethoven symphony Wednesday at Holy Name Church in West Roxbury. Symphony No. 1, Op. 21 - the highlight of a program including the premiere of a Tom Myron aria, works by Hindemith and Brahms, and "Music From Super Mario Galaxy" - is the first of Beethoven's nine symphonies that will be presented by Smith's Fauxharmonic Orchestra over the next year.

Though he now roams digital worlds, the Fauxharmonic director's musical training was decidedly traditional. Smith played piano at 8, moving on to cello, composition, and conducting as a teen. He later studied at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and was tutored by noted conductor Sergiu Celibidache, whose insistence on the primacy of the concert hall experience left a lasting impression.

Smith first experimented with digital music in the 1980s at MIT's Media Lab, where he tinkered with Kurzweil samplers and a 14-foot Bosendorfer piano hooked up to a Macintosh computer. "I spent lots of time trying to get those machines to play Brahms," Smith says, "but they were inflexible and unexpressive. A musician knows how to let a sound die out before starting the next phrase. Getting a computer to do that is hit or miss, mostly miss."

Revisiting digital music in 2006, Smith discovered that the wireless game controllers of Nintendo's Wii system could be used to command the digital orchestra with a new flexibility, bringing it out of the recording studio and into the concert hall. With new tools in hand, Smith set to work on the Fauxharmonic Orchestra - part symphonic digital instrument, part multi-timbral classical rave.

Drawing from several million recorded samples of orchestral instruments stored on a computer, Smith prepares the music for performance, giving the score "a rough-hewn shape" while leaving some performance elements undetermined. Programmed according to the score, balance, and shape of the music, laptops play back the arrangement into high-end, Dalek-shaped BeoLab 5 loudspeakers, each delivering 2,500 watts of amplification. Smith uses Wii remotes as his baton, translating arm motion into tempo, timbre, brightness, starts, and stops. By leaning forward on a standing pad he can make sections of his phantom orchestra - violin, brass, percussion - louder.

"I'll point to the trumpets to emphasize sounds or important aesthetic aspects, just as a traditional conductor would," Smith says. "But since I face the audience, pretending they're the orchestra, I've learned to conduct backward, with the sounds coming from behind me.

"Obviously, I'm not the first person to play electronic music through speakers," Smith continues. "But it's usually experimental music, so listeners can't really know whether a piece is succeeding or failing because of the piece, technology, or performer. Beethoven's masterpieces give us well-known entities for judging the quality of the instrument."

It's up to Smith to make it all flex and breathe while delivering the musical power needed to fill Holy Name's 100-foot cathedral ceilings. "Saying that the sound must be more tender means nothing to a Macintosh," Smith says. "I have to take what 'more tenderly' means acoustically - the timing, volume, shaping, sculpting, and balance of notes - and translate that to a computer."

With symphonic music at risk as a living art, Smith sees digital orchestras, which don't require the expense or manpower of traditional ensembles, as a lifeline. "The orchestra is 400 years old and slow to change. But it is changing. And the digital orchestra is a new instrument that eventually will split off and do its own thing, like the piano after the harpsichord or the guitar when electric players like Jimi Hendrix opened up new worlds.

"The Fauxharmonic Orchestra can't replace connecting with other human beings to create music. But this is just Digital Orchestra 1.0. It has no rules yet to restrict imaginations. When versions 3, 4, and 5 come along, we'll see that this was just the beginning." - The Boston Globe