Sat front row at the symphony...

frogman,

Your analogy of pointillistic artists actually makes my case, haha.  The semi-random points provide lots of detail at close viewing, but they don't make much sense until you move away and then can see what the real picture is.  The distant blend is the real message, but the details are lost, assuming you have normal visual acuity of 20/20 or so.  (But I have met some teenagers who have fantastic acuity of 20/10, so at 10 feet away where the normal vision people see only the whole, the teenager still sees the details of the small points, and he might need to move 20 feet away to appreciate the real message).  

My point is that the pointillistic artistic message is the blend, but it is not a detailed message.  We all enjoy the message, but it is a mistake to consider it as a DETAIL missing from the close viewing.  It's just a different message, not a detailed message.  I enjoy blends in other sensory forms, such as the unique ice cream blends you can create at Thomas Sweet in Princeton, NJ.  My favorite blend that I choose is sweet cream ice cream with malt balls and Reece's peanut butter cups, fully blended to fine particles in their machine.  They do it better than any other place.  It's an enjoyable blend, but the enjoyment doesn't derive from appreciation of details.  In contrast, a gourmet assortment of separate dishes of various meats, vegetables is best enjoyed tasting each item individually where all the details can be perceived.  Chinese dimsum is such an assortment of 10-20 small savory items, each enjoyed as a single entity.  It would be foolish to dump all the dimsum items together in a blended soup.  Yes, you might create an interesting hodge-podge blended taste, but it is smarter to enjoy the details of each item separately.

I love to hear some atmospheric distant orchestra recordings, such as in the Tchaikovsky Suite #3 in the 1973 EMI recording with Adrian Boult and the London Phllharmonic.  In one of the variations, the oboe shines above the soft entire string section.  (Or is it the English horn?  If the details were better captured with closer miking, I would have less doubt).  The recorded ambience is gorgeous.  This is a beautiful blend, but nothing thrills me more than to play in the orchestra close to many of the instruments.  I revel in the fine tone colors of different winds.  But from far away, the ambience, although beautiful, causes tonal smearing so that most of the delicate tone colors are markedly lost.

Your job as a pro is to please most of your paying customers, the audience, who mostly sit far away.  That's why you seek advice from your colleagues about how your instrument sounds 30-150 feet away.  The mass audience wants the blend, but they don't realize how much beauty there is in the details only heard close.

I haven't had much opportunity to enjoy a band of the sax family.  I might enjoy a performance from a distance, but I wouldn't learn as much than if I heard them close where the subtle differences in tonality would be better heard.  For a relatively quiet instrument like the violin, I need to be much closer to hear more of the differences between violins.  I could appreciate that for the much larger winds with more bass content, it would be important to sit further away to fully allow the blend to develop.  Let's say that the optimum distance might be 30 feet to get the ideal combination of detail and blend.  Moving to 60 feet would get more blend but sacrifice fine detail of tonal nuance.

**** Your analogy of pointillistic artists actually makes my case, haha. ****

Not at all. Well, not in my world and that of just about every musician I know. Detail that by your own admission “does not make much sense” is meaningless and irrelevant as concerns what matters most, the music.

We are further apart than I even thought. While we are both musicians we live in different music worlds, in every sense of the term. No point (pun intended 😊) in addressing all that you just wrote, but I will address only one more of your comments and one which I think explains a lot:

**** Your job as a pro is to please most of your paying customers, the audience, who mostly sit far away. ****

Wrong! When playing in an orchestra, my job as a musician is to honor the music; IOW, “please” the composer by way of the conductor’s direction (sorry, audience).

Anyway, while I don’t have a problem with your wish to be “right” about this it’s probably best to end this dialogue as it is feeling like a competition of sorts. Your “haha” seems very telling.

I have enjoyed our dialogue, but prefer to move on. Regards.

We like to go to our local music conservatory for recitals and performances. Always a thousand times better than the best recordings on my pretty damn good system. I especially like string quartets. The way they communicate with their glances during specific dramatic passages makes the music and their players even more captivating. The best part is that it's almost always free and you support future musicians. 

Good for you! The level of musicianship possessed by today’s conservatory (college) age musicians is fantastic. Gets better with each generation due to better and better training. Attending performances at local conservatories is one of the sleeper sources of good live music. Of course, not on the same level as the great artists, but definitely worthwhile. Moreover, budding artists need to perform in front of live audiences, so it is a big help to them.