Why did the Musicians Union outlaw synthesisers in 1982?
As was so often the case, it was Barry Manilow’s fault. In 1982, the singer decided to go on tour with a selection of synth players rather than the orchestra he’d worked with on his previous outing. When the MU caught wind of the decision, its members began calling for an outright ban of synthesisers to protect the jobs of string players. In May 1982, the union passed the motion, causing outrage among the musical community.
On the same day in 1973, Jefferson Airplane found themselves at the pointy end of the technophobic rage. The band was prevented from playing their scheduled concert in Golden Gate Park in their hometown of San Francisco due to a ban on amplified music. When they arrived, the band found a couple of hundred middle-aged protestors shouting: ”We built this city on orchestral music,” a chant that inspired one of Starship’s most recognisable hits, ‘We Built This City’, released in 1985.
In the ’90s, most formally-trained film composers used live orchestras. They would have learned their trade in a conservatoire, cutting their teeth the old fashioned way by writing scores and conducting the orchestra from that score. Think John Williams swirling his baton to the ‘Jurassic Park Theme’. In those days, the composers earning the big bucks were largely unfamiliar with the new digital practices coming in. To cover their blind spots, they hired assistants well versed in the ins and outs of virtual instruments and sample packs. Today, those assistants (people like Hanz Zimmer) are the composers earning the big bucks, and while many of them are still classically trained, they often rely on virtual orchestral plugins to make their scores, something which has massively altered the work of classical string, woodwind, brass and percussion musicians.
A few years ago, Spitfire Audio worked closely with the BBC Symphony Orchestra to craft a VST plugin for professional film and TV composers, sampling a huge variety of instruments and articulations to create a highly realistic-sounding ‘orchestra in a box.’ Far from putting the players out of work, this venture actually provided the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s musicians with a long term project, and a portion of the profit from every pack sold goes directly to the musicians who feature on it.
The synthesisers of the 1980s became sonic mainstays because of their analogue imperfection, but one wonders if the ubiquity of quantising, highly realistic VSTs, etcetera is leading to a fear of imperfection and a worrying homogeneity in the kind of music we’re making. Then again, maybe I’m just a neo-Luddite.