DSD

On a 5 minute break (read pro­cras­ti­na­tion vaca­tion) from prepar­ing for my oral exam next week, I came across the inter­est­ing YouTube Sym­phony: “The world’s first col­lab­o­ra­tive orchestra.”

YouTube explains:

We have invited musi­cians from around the world to audi­tion for the YouTube Sym­phony Orches­tra. The video entries will be com­bined into the first ever col­lab­o­ra­tive vir­tual per­for­mance, and the world will select the best to per­form at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.

Musi­cians “audi­tioned” by post­ing on YouTube a video of them­selves play­ing one of a few des­ig­nated audi­tion pieces. From there, YouTube picked a few dozen final­ists and has invited us view­ers to vote on the ones we like (or give thumbs down to the ones we don’t).

Cool, but Why?

Most peo­ple in the clas­si­cal music world are well aware that the old mod­els of expen­sive weekly sym­phony orches­tra con­certs, attended faith­fully by the well-to-do, are dying. And many per­ceive a huge dan­ger that clas­si­cal music as we know it could die too. As it grows harder for orches­tral musi­cians to find jobs, fewer young clas­si­cal musi­cians will pur­sue the intense train­ing nec­es­sary to play at a high level.^[1]

There have been some attempts to chal­lenge the old mod­els and find new audi­ences. An exam­ple is the orches­tra City­Mu­sic Cleve­land, which trav­els around to dif­fer­ent neigh­bor­hoods offer­ing free con­certs, sur­viv­ing on dona­tions, in an attempt to reach out to peo­ple who wouldn’t oth­er­wise hear much clas­si­cal music.^[2] The YouTube Sym­phony is a fun idea, though not the hippest ever, and my guess is that it was cre­ated with sim­i­lar goals in mind. From The Wash­ing­ton Post:

The idea, launched by two YouTube employ­ees at an off­site retreat about a year ago, is being greeted enthu­si­as­ti­cally by the clas­si­cal music world, which Tim Lee, one of the project’s ini­tia­tors, tact­fully described as “hun­gry for innovation.“

Clas­si­cal artists and admin­is­tra­tors at the New York news con­fer­ence Mon­day vis­i­bly basked in the glow of what, in their world, is the equiv­a­lent of being noticed by the cool kids at recess.

The Real Rea­son for This Post

Now back to that pro­cras­ti­nat­ing. One of the YouTube Sym­phony audi­tion pieces, the Presto from Bach’s Sonata 1 in g minor for solo vio­lin, is very near and dear to my heart. It was one of my favorites to play as a youn­gin’ and it’s fun watch­ing oth­ers interpret/perform/maim it.^[3]

I haven’t seen a huge num­ber of audi­tion videos, but one of my favorites so far is this per­for­mance by Ben Chan. While most of the audi­tion­ees seem like they’re out for revenge or some­thing, Ben’s play­ing is nicely musi­cal. How­ever, this video of the Presto at 224 bpm explains how he got any vio­lence out of his system:

I’m sure it brings back painful mem­o­ries for my sis­ter, who heard me attempt this (and fail) basi­cally every day of my high school junior year.

Also, it kind of reminds me of Kas­par Weiss and the Poussin-meter:

And this hilar­i­ous exchange on The Super­est:

Alle­gris­simo

defeated by Metro-Gnome

defeated by Jeal­ous Jockey

defeated by Extreme Measures

1. Not that the music world itself would die out. Not much chance of that any time soon. Peo­ple who see dan­ger in the wan­ing of clas­si­cal music are peo­ple who specif­i­cally value clas­si­cal music. And that posi­tion cer­tainly isn’t objec­tively right. [↩]
2. Full dis­clo­sure: so yeah, my mom is a cofounder. [↩]
3. I usu­ally believe that YouTube com­ments should never be repro­duced any­where, but I liked this one about the Presto: “ACH! I printed out the sheet music for this and it looks like a bunch of ants climb­ing moun­tains.” [↩]