The YouTube Symphony Legacy

Here are ten important lessons to learn from the YouTube Symphony (if you’ve just joined us and don’t know why the YouTube Symphony is packed full of important lessons please start with the article immediately below this one):

1)      Lots of people are skilled in playing classical music.  Performance is not a dying art despite much publicity to the contrary.  In fact, the level of performance may be at an all-time high.

2)      Plenty of people are interested in hearing classical music performed.

3)      The appreciation of classical music has spread throughout the world.  It is not confined to its historic roots in Europe.

4)      Many of the people who are interested in classical music are young and don’t fit the gray haired stereotype with which it is often associated.

5)      Significant numbers of classical music fans embrace technology.  This also defies the stereotype.

6)      Despite their image for being serious and even dour, classical music fans respond enthusiastically to promotions which are fun and whimsical.

7)      The internet is a highly effective means for getting out the word about classical music events.

8)      Classical music is not without its problems.  In fact, it even has some outright enemies.  The most destructive of these are among the people who imagine they are its best friends.

9)      If things are done correctly you can make a big splash with classical music events.

10)    Is the most important, counterintuitive, and usually misapplied lesson and it….will be the subject of my next post on this blog.

Yes, that’s a tease and I don’t even apologize for it.

Stay tuned.

Once Upon A Time In YouTube

A classical music fairytale came to life about a year and a half ago.

The unlikely source of enchantment was YouTube, that’s right, YouTube the website with all the videos, which created a symphony orchestra from scratch for one spectacular night at Carnegie Hall.

Ninety-six musicians, mostly amateurs, were plucked from obscurity and whisked to New York City where they spent three magical days rehearsing under celebrated maestro Michael Tilson Thomas.

Newspaper reporters elbowed one another trying to get interviews and television crews shot miles of footage as bloggers speculated and tickets sales soared.  For one brief shining moment classical music was intensely cool.

Now, more than a year later, the magic has worn off.  All that remains of this fairytale are memories and a moral no one takes to heart:

Crowds flock to classical music when it is presented with an air of excitement.

So, why doesn’t classical music change the way it does business?  It is, after all, filled with smart people.  I know this for a fact.  Classical music people are very smart.  I know they are very smart because they have told me so over and over since even before I was a classical music person.

So why do these smart people resist doing something smart?  Perhaps they are too smart to learn from something as tacky as a corporate promotion.

Yes a corporate promotion, that’s exactly what the YouTube Symphony was.  It was utterly shameless and I admire it very much.  I’ll be fortunate to ever see another classical music promotion which is even half as effective.

By the standards classical music has grown accustomed to, the YouTube Symphony garnered an enormous amount of press.  Just give it a Google to see what I mean.

The entire promotion was cunning in conception.

It began with YouTube inviting the world’s musicians to audition by submitting videos.  Thousands poured in and two hundred finalists were offered up for final selection by means of on-line voting.

Eventually ninety-six winners emerged from thirty countries.  They rehearsed briefly under the direction of no less a maestro than Michael Tilson Thomas and played a one night stand in Carnegie Hall.

The hall was packed and the audience loved it.

Predictably, the critics were unimpressed.  Though most of them surely knew better, they pretended to be dismayed that an orchestra of amateurs assembled from far flung lands didn’t sound as proficient and polished as a professional orchestra.

Yes, this YouTube Symphony was an interesting novelty but it really wasn’t up to the standards of the New York Philharmonic.  (Though one must prefer Chicago from back in its golden age of course.  Sniff.  Sniff.)

I can’t argue with that, though of course this sort of “thinking” misses the point.

The YouTube Symphony was all about hype and buzz which is precisely why the critics hated it.

Classical music has lost touch with its roots.  That may sound like an oxymoron but it is so very true.  Hype and buzz have been part of music since time immemorial.  Paganini, Wagner, and Liszt were the Michael Jacksons of their day and worked damn hard to make it so.

Hype and buzz are fully as tangible as music and have an aesthetic all their own.

The YouTube Symphony made the point splendidly.

And no one missed the point better than Tom Service from The Guardian in Great Britain who, by the way, didn’t even attend the concert.  His review was….wait for it…based on the YouTube video.

The Guardian’s headline writer summarized Mr. Service’s review neatly:  “My verdict on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra?  Mediocre and pointless.  Its musicians come from 30 countries and are technically competent, but this orchestra is nothing more than a YouTube gimmick.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2009/apr/17/orchestra-youtube

Wow Tom, you really think so?

How soon can we get another gimmick this good?

Other major critics expressed a similar mixture of snobbishness and studiously hypocritical sympathy.  They all mentioned the excitement but claimed not to understand that the excitement itself was the point.  Even the Washington Post’s usually sensible Anne Midgette mistook the cart for the wheels.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2009/04/the_viral_orchestra_final_thou.html

The video of the YouTube Symphony is still online but I have never bothered to watch it.  The video and indeed the whole concert was merely an after-thought to the portion of the YouTube Symphony phenomenon that really matters:  the hype.  I have no doubt the orchestra lacked precision.  Could something more be expected from an orchestra three days old?

That’s irrelevant to what the YouTube Symphony can teach us. The YouTube Symphony was virtuoso of buzz par excellence.

In fact right now more people play more instruments more perfectly than at any other time in history.  But technical perfection alone doesn’t seem to be selling tickets.  We live in a world where great played go unappreciated.  Classical music must learn to project excitement, hype, and buzz or it will become a smaller and smaller part of society.

That’s no fairytale, as even Anne Midgette and Tom Service agree.

Black Violin Gets Me Started

It’s easily the loudest concert I ever sat through.

It was “Black Violin,” which combines amplified violin and viola backed by a DJ and a drummer to produce a show fusing jazz, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n roll and hip hop with a whole lot of showmanship.

The result is very loud but very musical.

These guys are good fiddlers and great entertainers.  They worked the crowd masterfully, which surprised me since when I met them in person they were rather quiet, a bit self-effacing, and impeccably polite.

They are also very smart.  I never expected to meet a hip hop star who bemoaned the fact he never had the opportunity to play music by Carl Stamitz, but that’s exactly what Kev Marcus, the violinist, said when he noticed a Stamitz CD piled in a stack near the KLEF console.

The two stars of “Black Violin” met in school and decided to explore what their instruments could do with hip hop.  They experimented.  They entered competitions.  They won awards.  And they caught on…big.

More power to them!  They are sweet natured and intelligent young men who earned their chops the hard way.  They deserve a bountiful harvest.

Their music will never be my first choice.  I think it would sound one hundred percent better if it were fifty percent as loud.  But such whining is pointless.  Perhaps you know the saying, “For those who enjoy this sort of thing this is the sort of thing they will enjoy.”

Suffice to say “Black Violin” successfully treads the treacherous path which takes serious musicians to successful careers.  Many embark but few arrive.

So these guys deserve special attention.  They know what they are doing and they know for whom they do it, which brings me to the most important lesson I took away from the show.

All through the show I was pretty sure they were headed towards Bach; after all it is the first track on their CD and their version of the Brandenburg Third is a YouTube favorite.  Sure enough, it proved a centerpiece of the program but it took a while to get there.

They breezed through song after song and the crowd loved them all.  Near the shank of the show Wil-B, the violist, observed that they’d covered a lot of musical ground, “And now we’d like to play some classical.  Would you mind if we played something classical?”

It was the first time a selection got anything like an introduction and classical was the only genre the whole evening which got anything resembling an apology.

It mattered not at all.  The crowd was so enthralled with “Black Violin” that musical tooth picking would have earned an ovation.  And sure enough a big ovation is exactly what their hip-hop Brandenburg Third received.

My first reaction was to wonder how much longer the cheers would have lasted had Bach not been prefaced by an apology.

My second reaction was to bemoan the lost opportunity for two idolized young musicians to say something nice about classical music.

Perhaps “the kind of music that got us started” or “still great after all these years” might have won some respect for classical music among the crowd.

Well, maybe.

Further reflection made me realize that the two front men of “Black Violin” are absolute masters of what they do.  Only a fool strolls into the Sistine Chapel and suggests Michelangelo didn’t use enough orange in the lower left corner.  Nor does a wise man second guess the way “Black Violin” addresses its audience.

If things have come to such a pretty pass that classical music must to be introduced with an apology so be it.  There’s no point blaming the messengers.

The real question is what you do with the information.

I have some ideas.

Stay tuned.

And remember:  when it comes to re-vitalizing the popularity of classical music everybody is wrong but me.

For another look at “Black Violin” here’s Mike Dunham of the Anchorage Daily News  reporting on a school performance:

http://www.adn.com/2009/04/01/744987/black-violin-leaves-students-shouting.html

To size up “Black Violin’s” version of Bach try this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCXVCpcopa8