One rainy evening in November 1994, I went for dinner with an old oboe-playing friend in Putney, Christopher O'Neal. He's a great oboist, and always wins at chess, but that's not important right now ... Over a seriously generous gin and tonic, he showed me his latest new toy: an electronic piano. I'd never heard of the things. It had a floppy drive, and even a CD drive. He put in a CD, and began playing the theme from Love Story, accompanied by a very self-indulgent orchestra on the CD. I was transfixed. I decided on the spot that I had to have one.

A few days later, again far too early for my dentist appointment, I bought a similar device from Chapell's. After it was delivered, it sat like a cuckoo's egg in my conservatory for a few days. I spotted a score of Bach's B minor Mass lying on the floor. Using the device's internal memory I played all parts of the first few pages into its RAM, and then played the whole lot back, utterly astonished that it worked so well. Then I found some plugholes around the back, and I wondered what they were supposed to achieve. Reading the manual, I saw that they were MIDI in and MIDI out.

MIDI? I decided to investigate further.

Later that night, much later actually, I had it connected to a PC with MIDI cables. I told Windows to address it as the default MIDI device, and found on the Internet (at www.prs.net - which now is also www.classicalarchives.com) lots of MIDI data that I could squirt directly at it. Pierre's site could play my new toy far better that I could. I discovered that the MIDI could be imported into an editor on screen, and I could even make new MIDI files from nothing. But my piano playing was not really up to it. So I invited my good friend John Lenehan to come over and explore possibilities.

By the time John arrived, I had hooked up other MIDI modules to the PC, so we had a wider range of noises. John sat and played around for a few minutes on the keyboard. He understood immediately and perfectly what we might achieve. He said "I have an idea..." and while I sat at the PC, John sat at the keyboard and asked: "Please put me on bass guitar. ... No not that one -- yes, that one!" and he played for about 3 minutes a solo bass guitar part that he'd just invented, and which made little or no sense to me. Then he said "A solo horn please..." and added another part from the top. The process went on until about 3.30 AM by which time we had a nearly empty bottle of Calvados, and a fully orchestrated brand new original John Lenehan track that we called, with rare creativity, JL1. Later this was renamed The Road to Provence.

After that very significant evening, John and I met occasionally for several months to see what else we might create. We made a number of tracks, in a variety of styles. Many of these are completely original. John played all the notes, and invented most of them. I invented a few. Some tracks borrowed themes from great composers of the past - That seemed so much easier than borrowing themes from great composers of the future.

I tried to help John as much as possible by making the technical stuff work with no hassle. Often it did.

We experimented too by taking scores of well know classics such as The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and attempting to make them sound as real as possible. The result was disturbingly good - especially for a traditional professional musician. It's usually possible for an educated musician to tell our "synth" version from an acoustically recorded version, but sometimes the difference is not really in favour of the acoustic version.

In the summer of 1998, Nigel Kennedy asked us to make orchestrations of many popular pieces for Violin and Piano. These were for a new EMI CD, now released as "Classic Kennedy". John and I worked fast and created about an hour's worth of brand new orchestrations in a few days. Naturally, we used what had now become known to us as The Virtual Orchestra to hear how our work might sound. While we worked on this, sometimes Nigel would come in with his violin. He tried out some of the pieces by playing along with our synth backing. This was very useful in getting the orchestrations as good as possible. For the actual recording, we printed out all the scores and the orchestral parts. The recording sessions were held with the English Chamber Orchestra. Secretly I always knew that this real orchestra was not in every case an improvement on our virtual one! After the sessions were over, we explored different ways in which we might commercialise the Virtual Orchestra. It had so much potential. We came up with the idea of providing accompaniments for those who want to learn to play an instrument. This seemed to be an area where demand can reasonably be expected to be high. Competition exists, but only at terribly low quality.

At first, I put up a web site using Real Video. This streamed our accompaniments over the 'Net, displaying solo notation (and/or words) and turning pages at just the right moment. It worked quite well, and I demonstrated this to several people.

One of these, not quite understanding what I'd done, asked: Does it record the kid?

My response was: No, but it can, and it will -- next week!

It was a great suggestion. I went home and wrote an application which I called "PLAY".

This app downloads our accompaniments from a web site (now at www.rhythmica.com). It plays the accompaniment while not only displaying the solo notation and turning pages, but also recording! After recording is finished, the same app allows replay and remix of the take(s), and the mix down file can even be compressed and attached to an email so that someone else can hear your performance. Anyone else, anywhere.

This is such a simple idea, yet one with huge implications: Music competitions, remote auditions, lessons, or just to amuse a friend or relative...

www.rhythmica.com is now alive and well on the Internet, and most of the accompaniments that are now available for download were in fact either recorded acoustically, or acquired from other sources. Both classical and popular music are there.

While this has been a fascinating and terribly exciting evolution or our original Virtual Orchestra idea, it's also very far removed now from the first concept. So far removed in fact, that I would now like also to see what potential still exists for the earlier idea of inventing and recording new music with new technology. You can hear some examples on this web site by clicking this link.