The long tail of the web in classical music
This week’s New Yorker has a very good article by Alex Ross on why the Internet has been great for classical music.
Ross starts with a rundown of the hundreds of music blogs that have emerged over the past few years.
Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.
Then he points to a new web service from the San Francisco Symphony called Keeping Score.
Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco’s music director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Tilson Thomas and the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductor’s explanations of the particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented their instruments.
The “Explore the Score” web service, which links the music of the piece to the orchestral score, is one of the best implementations of learning for the web I have seen so far. This is something that could only be done on the web. It is beautifully produced.
Ross goes on to describe how the classical music recording house, Naxos, has now made its catalog available online for $19.95 per month. Music is streamed and played with a flash player inside the browser. The catalog is extensive and includes jazz and folk as well as classical music.
And classical music is even finding its way to You Tube.
Explore posts in the same categories: UncategorizedThe Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from the farmlands of Allendale, Michigan, provides a case study in how new technology is playing to classical music’s benefit. Last year, part of the group travelled to New York to attend Steve Reich’s seventieth-birthday festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand Valley’s director, Bill Ryan, wrote a firsthand account of the visit for the Web site NewMusicBox, introducing his ensemble to a wider audience. In June, they performed Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” at Bang on a Can’s annual marathon concert in downtown New York; their time slot was five in the morning, but, for reasons that no one could quite understand, some four hundred listeners showed up to hear them play. The ensemble’s recording of “Music for 18” is being released this week on the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video “trailer” on YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reich’s hyper-urban music with shots of rolling cornfields. The Michigan musicians play with glistening precision, yet they also bring out the variously jubilant and wistful emotions beneath the surface of Reich’s score. The result is a vibrant recording that deserves to leap from the new-music ghetto onto the mainstream charts.
