Here’s the Youtube Symphony Orchestra, the first ever online collaborative orchestra, performing at Carnegie Hall on April 15th 2009. The orchestra was composed of 96 professional and amateur musicians from 30+ countries and territories on six continents and represented 26 different instruments. The orchestra played movements and excerpts from 15 wildly diverse works for over 59 minutes, but opened up the evening with Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony No. 1, “Eroica.”
I’m four days late on this, but better late then never: votes are on for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. They started on Feb 14th and will on go till the 22th. Over 3000 contestants applied and submitted their videos to youtube and now only 200 semi-finalists have been selected for the public voting phase. Absolutely anyone can cast a vote and play a role in the elaboration of the YouTube’s first ever orchestra that will perform a Tan Dun composition at the Carnegie Hall on April 16th.
When I did my first post on this event, I guess I didn’t really have an opinion besides the fact that it would probably be successful. I don’t see it failing, but I now ‘feel’ a certain level of absurdity behind the recruiting method. I’m listening to a pianist performing some Beethoven while I’m writing this post. Before that, I listened to some flutes, violas and violins, and all in all I’m having a pretty hard time voting down :)
I have been playing music for quite some years and know people who make a living out of it. I also know some people who are trying to make it in the classical scene. I have extensively worked as a sound engineer and composer on different projects and have been surrounded by musicians all my life (some of which I consider to be true geniuses and others average amateurs). Well even with my musical background and my understanding of the art, I find it hard to be properly subjective in the time frame I allow myself to spend on this Youtube orchestra thing. I don’t believe people that know nothing else about music than the top-40 charts will willingly spend time listening to these classical pieces, but some will, and I truly think many voters will be more influenced by the pretty face of a girl participant than by the quality and subtlety of her playing. And if there aren’t any pretty girls or young prodigy’s, people will tend to listen only to the videos that are on top of their list (the lists of vids hopefully mix-up everytime you refresh the page).
Speaking of misleading criteria, by the very nature if the recruiting process participants recorded their performances with whatever recording material they could get their hands on. Well some recordings are crappy and distorted. Now you have to truly be passionate and a real adept of classical music to feel the subtle differences between an orchestra directed by lets say Karajan and Furtwngler. Well the same basically applies for the musicians – how can one cast a proper vote with audio glitches, slow buffering and horrible audio compression? Well they can’t.
Maybe I’m a little too extreme here and maybe the large majority of the voters will be true musicians from the classical realm, and maybe this whole recruiting 2.0 process is all mighty and revolutionary (argh! again in the extremes). Ok, simply put, maybe the chosen artists will make up for a beautiful orchestra and their performances will be a true success. After all they all sound like frigin’ pros.
Actually I’m more confused about my opinion after having written this post than before. What’s your take on this?
I’ll leave you to the performance that impressed me the most:
Google is everywhere, we all know that. Being the most important and used search engine was never enough. Now their latest idea (through their acquisition: Youtube) is to create the world’s very first collaborative online orchestra. The plan is simple: to get musicians from all over to audition for a classical music piece composed by Tan Dun by downloading the appropriate music sheets (corresponding to their instrument of choice), performing and recording themselves with a digital camera and uploading those recordings as submissions to participate in the orchestra.
Submissions opened yesterday and will go on up to the 28th on January. The youtube community will be asked to vote for the semi-finalists from the 14th to the 22th of February. The finalists will perform a concert at the Carnegie hall in April, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony. Tan Dun will release a compilation of all the audition-videos in a YouTube mashup. Apparently Google will arrange for visas and pay costs.
Classical music auditions usually involve months of preparation, very unhealthy doses of stress to finally play in front of a couple of musical geniuses and masters of musical theory and analysis. With this Google/Youtube method you’ll still have to deal with the prep, but with less stress.
If they get a big community on board, Tan Dun’s piece might get global attention leading to a very tight competition.
If this works, and it probably will (better than we think), I don’t see why it wouldn’t open up a new trend for professional classical musicians and orchestra managers.
Wonder if pre-recorded videos could work for a typical rock band’s audition…
