Music of the Clouds

Video of J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, from St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach composed and conducted

I recently attended a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. It was an excellent performance of a piece that is in six parts, each part originally intended for performance on one of the six feast days of the Christmas period. The Christmas Oratorio includes an orchestra, a chorus, and soloists who sing the character roles.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the greatest composers of classical and religious music. He wrote for all instruments and ensembles of his time, including choir, orchestra, voice, harpsichord, lute, violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, and organ. The melodic and harmonic language that we hear in most music today developed during Bach’s time, the Baroque period. Bach was a prolific composer, whose catalog currently includes 1,128 pieces.

Bach was also a prolific procreator. The stories of today’s large families that we occasionally hear about pale somewhat in comparison to Bach, who fathered 20 children, although only 10 survived to adulthood in a time when medical expertise was primitive and life expectancy short compared to today. Four of his children became composers whose music is still played today.

An important feature of hearing a performance at Davies Symphony Hall is the acoustic properties of the hall, which was acoustically renovated in 1992. Here is San Francisco Chronicle Music Critic Robert Commanday’s reaction to the new sound of the hall. I think the most interesting acoustic features of the hall are the moveable plexiglas“clouds” above the stage. As this San Francisco Chronicle article by Jesse Hamlin explains in more detail, the 59 clouds can be raised, lowered, and angled to best project and blend the music being played. For example, the clouds could be positioned higher to resonate, blend, and project a gigantic Mahler symphony, and lower to capture and project the relatively quiet sound of a string quartet. The clouds can be sculpted in a wave shape or aligned, like a ceiling, in a single plane.

Video of the San Francisco Symphony recording Maher’s Symphony No. 8, “Symphony of a Thousand,” in Davies Symphony Hall, with good video of the plexiglas clouds above the stage

Cloud computing has similar properties to the acoustic clouds in Davies Symphony Hall, providing the flexibility that companies need to adjust to changing business conditions. Whether rolling out productivity applications for all users on a grand scale, like Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” or scaling business intelligence from a successful team project, like a string quartet, to a mid-size department, like a Mozart symphony, cloud-based solutions move with your needs. Furthermore, cloud-based solutions can integrate with each other and with legacy systems, just like new and ancient instruments may play together in a modern composition.

Consider this integrated orchestra of instrumental cloud-based solutions under the direction of your line-of-business virtuosi and Maestro Kenneth Marshall:

• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services. 
• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Recording of “Nuages” (Clouds) by jazz guitar great Django Reinhardt and his orchestra

Clouds can transform your business just as they transformed the sound of Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. With the flexibility to instantly scale by adding and removing users; low infrastructure costs, configuration, and up-front investments; and the ability to compose and orchestrate new solutions almost as fast as Bach could compose a cantata or a fugue; your management, peers, and users will sing your praise all the way to the clouds.

As composer-in-residence at your organization, what cloud-based instruments do you plan to include in your next masterpiece?