BLOG: The YouTube Symphony - or, I'm Liking This 21st Century Thing

To many outside classical music, the idea of a symphonic concert underwritten by YouTube seemed an amusingly puzzling idea - curious enough to garner a few extra clicks from web surfers in search of some answers. (Hence the millions of visitors thus far to YouTube.com/symphony.) But to some inside classical music, the enterprise immediately provoked a defensive posture, as if this rarified world should not be bought by Google (YouTube’s owner) for mere image burnishing. Like many artistic fields, classical music has no shortage of indigenous cynicism.

I, too, had a furrowed brow when, last December, Michael Tilson Thomas asked me if I would be interesting in joining the April 15 "YouTube Symphony" concert at Carnegie Hall. Using his unique communicative skills to push music education to the internet, MTT has become the maestro for a digital age - and was the perfect person to lead the project. The two of us were already working together on the upcoming premiere of The B-Sides, a new electro-acoustic commission for the San Francisco Symphony, and perhaps Michael thought a new symphonic work imbued with techno grooves would be a welcome addition to the YouTube Symphony program. Who knows, but I certainly was happy to be asked.

But I wasn't sure what the YouTube Symphony's mission could possibly be, since the world of Beethoven and internet video do not exactly intersect. The stated mission of the project, to use internet video as a new way to audition and form an orchestra from scratch, did not seem particularly innovative because video has been used for years as an audition tool. So I, too, had my doubts; though I'll admit - as a composer fascinated with the electronic possibilities of the orchestra - I probably had more hope for the project's success than my more suspicious brethren. Works such as Liquid Interface, Music From Underground Spaces, or Rusty Air in Carolina all stem from my firm belief that classical music can benefit from the powers of the digital age.

What I saw that evening, from my perch in the percussion playing laptop, was a beautiful vision of classical music's future. Our field can withstand more than we think. An immersive, high-tech updating of the concert experience can work wonders - as long as there is substance.

And substance was Michael's great service to the project: what could have been a pops concert, or a collection of old war horses, was instead a wild ride through 600 years of style, time, and place. These sudden musical shifts struck me as invigorating and compelling - going from Johannes Brahms to Lou Harrison - and they were accompanied by one of the concert's greatest attributes: its use of video to explode the dusty program book into an immersive feast for the eyes.

I have become so impatient with the buzz-killing set changes in classical concerts that, with Maestro Benjamin Shwartz and installation artist Anne Patterson, I curate a reimagination of the concert experience (called Mercury Soul) that disperses musicians and 'projected program notes' around the space. But the YouTube Symphony's cinematic program notes went beyond mere text, including interviews with players, brief biographical sketches of composers, and map flyovers worthy of the CIA. If an orchestra can possibly find a budget line for this kind of thing, it is an exciting new way to get information to the audience - and it all can happen while the stage hands are wasting everyone's time anyway.

The other innovation of the event, of course, was to offer digital distribution of a classical event moments after the final downbeat. In a field where composers often cannot get a recording of a premiere performance because of union regulations, a web broadcast seems near impossible. At the very least, orchestral webcasting will be slow to arrive because orchestras simply do not have money to hire a camera crew. But if, perchance, some Silicon Valley entrepreneur wanted to bring the symphony to the people in a new way, let's hope orchestra committees would see such an innovation as a something to embrace.

Of course, nothing can possibly replace the experience of actually being in Carnegie Hall, but a webcast stokes interest for those who want to keep tabs from afar. One successful example: the Van Cliburn Foundation added a huge web presence to its piano competition this year, and it pulled in hundreds of thousands of viewers from around the world who passionately blogged away before, during, and after each contestant played.

Michael Tilson Thomas has long been applauded as the heir to Berstein, with his compositional mind, virtuosic domination of the piano, and beautiful communication skills. But sitting there in the percussion section, on the very same stage where Berstein's Young People's Concerts were filmed, I felt Michael had further 'upped the ante' that night.