Turning Over: Why page turners matter | Hacker News Reader

Turning Over: Why page turners matter

van-us.atavist.com

71 pointsevilsimon25 comments

What a wonderful treatment of a particularly stressful job.

I'm a classically trained musician, but have little experience playing piano, yet I've been recruited to turn pages not infrequently. Somehow there seems to be more pressure as a page-turner than as a performer. I always felt extremely conscious of my place beside the musician, while as a performer, it is much easier to lose ones self in the muscle-memory and flow of a piece. Page-turning requires, as the essay describes, a special kind of focus.

I have been recruited as a page-turner more than I've needed a page-turner (usually played from memory). I think being the page-turner is more stressful because you can screw up the performance just as badly, but resulting from a much smaller level of negligence. That makes it seem so much worse if it happens.

I played clarinet for a few years from around 12 years old to 17 years old; I wasn't very good. Perhaps some other HN readers have a similar background.

I was shocked to see how a woman I dated prepared for a classical orchestra performance. She was a professional musician. An envelope of music arrived with her parts for a symphony performance. She would set aside a few days to practice it, then there would be one day of rehearsal and then the performance. The pages of music were complex, far more complex than any music I'd ever played or even looked at and of course a solo or exposed piano piece would likely have even more complex music to be read, putting a great deal of dependence on the page turner.

I suppose that by the time one is taking professional gigs like this that there is a standard repertoire and that some of the pieces might be at least a bit familiar. Nevertheless, I can't understand that level of musical ability, it seems super-human.

One other interesting fact: she had taken a few private lessons from very high level performers, principal oboe at NY Philharmonic as I recall. She asked him what would happen if he missed an exposed note during a performance, like a very soft note that might not get the oboe reeds to play. He said he couldn't make a mistake without risking his job. This is hearsay and I don't remember exactly what she said his answer was, but professional orchestra performance must have very serious pressure to deal with.

seems that the real source of the stress is that you're screwing up something that isn't really yours to screw up.

This article is - dare I say it? a page-turner!

Seriously, I never thought an article about such an esoteric topic would be so interesting.

Genuinly curious: why is this still a thing? How difficult could it be to throw together some screen, microphone and ML algorithm that would turn the pages (or roll then up) at appropriate time?

Why do you think that a software solution to this requires ML?

Recognizing audio as it's played and relating to written music from audio input?

Assuming that the musician or conductor doesn't get too creative, a lock-in amplifier coupled with a FFT should be enough to do the trick. (To put it in perspective, unless the orchestra is playing in a noisy bar, the sound of the piece should dominate from the device's perspective.)

Aside from the technical challenges of this, I think that it's not exactly in the spirit of classical performance, which often is as much about the incredible skill and attention-to-detail of the people on stage as it is about the sound of the music itself. So, I imagine many skilled pianists would still prefer a human page turner over such a device, even if it did exist and functioned perfectly.

But I think a fair question is: why are these performers even using sheet music? Imagine going to a pop concert and [insert favorite artist] was reading sheet music while dancing on stage. Shouldn't the music be in "muscle memory", even for classical performers? Wouldn't that open up more opportunities for contact between the performer and audience?

Classical music is drastically more complex. There’s orders of magnitude more stuff to remember.

One difference is that Pink Floyd made their entire careers on about thirty-five songs, iirc. That's about one season's worth of one symphony orchestra's repertoire, and most performers perform with multiple ensembles to make a living. Does the wedding gig string quartet have their regular repertoire memorized? Probably. Does the orchestra have the premiere by a minor Midwestern composer memorized? No, and they never will.

That's an entirely fair question, and in a lot of piano auditions at least in my experience memorization is required. Most of the time, sheet music isn't helpful because it answers "what chord am I supposed to play next?" but more so as a roadmap for the structure of the piece. Take a look at the sheet music for the Stockhausen Klavierstucke mentioned in the article and you can see why this would be helpful.

Organ rather than piano, but the repertoire for a month of cathedral services (assuming daily Evensong plus Sunday morning Eucharist) is vast, especially considering all the registrations (stop selections). Playing all that from memory is unrealistic.

Here’s a typical month at Worcester, and bear in mind it doesn’t include the voluntaries at the start and end of each service (though the start will sometimes be improvised, at least in part): http://www.worcestercathedral.co.uk/media/October_Scheme_201...

Most people aren't even aware that turning pages is a skill at all, let alone be impressed by it.

It's happening, albeit gradually. I play music, and a growing number of musicians are showing up with what looks like an overgrown LCD tablet, and a little pedal that they step on to advance the page. One of my band-mates takes every new chart, photographs it with his cell phone, and puts the chart back into the band's files.

Some pitfalls: The screens have to be big, with no glare. Each musician needs access to a scanner that can handle oversize pages. There needs to be a format that lets the musicians make edits and annotations on the fly.

The tech has to work perfectly. How many of us have been to meetings where something went wrong with the projector, or with PowerPoint?

To either earn a living or even be reasonably busy as an amateur, musicians have to handle a lot of last-minute work with multiple groups that all have varying levels of tech savvy. The bandleader just has to be in possession of the physical sheets, to be absolutely assured that they will work.

You don't even need the microphone or ML. You just need two foot pedals - one to move forward, and one to move back.

The problem is that some instruments have pedals too (e.g. the piano).

Right, but I can't think of very many situations where you're using both feet on a piano (in fact, I don't know if that's even mechanically possible). So that leaves at least one foot.

Organists would have to figure out some other strategy, though, since they do use both feet frequently. Still, if there's a button to push somewhere on the organ, that'd be at least easier than flipping a physical page.

Yes it's very much mechanically possible to use 2 pedals on the piano at the same time; it's not actually that uncommon.

For organists, these days pipe organs are usually outfit with a sequencer that allows the organist to program a list of registration changes (the combination of pipes/stops used) ahead of time; the organist then advances through the sequence of registrations, by bumping a bumper pedal with the side of their foot, or by pushing a toe stud pedal. Sometimes there are multiple toe stud pedals, which either allow for jumping straight to a specific combination, or for using the closest one as the program advance.

There’ll usually be a thumb piston for the sequencer as well as a foot piston, too.

There are many examples where two pedals are used simultaneously. If I'm remembering correctly, there's even a moment in a Ligeti Etude where all three pedals are needed. Regardless, using an iPad for sheet music is already being a adopted by classical pianists minus the foot pedals, like Yuja Wang: https://youtu.be/ZbEtk1kdYx4

Huh. Seems crazy to me; the soften and sustain pedals always seemed to be mutually exclusive (maybe not mechanically per se, but the pianos I've played on never seemed to allow both softened and sustained notes). Maybe it's just a feature of sufficiently fancy pianos (the "fanciest" on which I've ever played were baby grands in high school band classrooms).

But yeah, even a button press or screen swipe should be easy enough to be useful in all but the most extreme cases (and in those cases a combination of memorization and automatic turning (e.g. tied to a metronome) could help further).

I've only seen something like this once: Daniel Hope playing Gabriel Prokoviev's violin concerto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=985lfzTs79Q

I don't know what software he uses or how the pages get turned (by the time spent?).

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