Music In Modesto, California, Dr Calvin Lee breaks off from his morning’s work as an acupuncturist to talk about his passion for music. Although he studied the violin from the age of seven, Lee qualified as a general surgeon. For 15 years he has not played the violin in any serious way and the feverish practising that he is doing at the moment has given him a nasty back pain – although, as an acupuncturist, he knows a good treatment for tendonitis.
Meanwhile, over in Montreal, 15-year-old Stéphane Tetreault is putting in extra hours on the cello. He also started music lessons at seven and is now studying at the University of Montreal. This young musician has no doubts that his future lies as a professional cellist but, if any further inducement to practise was needed, the promise of playing his first concert at Carnegie Hall has focused his mind.
Lee and Tetreault have not met yet, but before long they will be among more than 90 musicians in 30 countries heading to New York to make up the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. It has ambitiously booked its public concert debut at Carnegie Hall on April 15, only days after the players meet for the first time.
The idea for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra came from one of the junior staff in Google’s office in London: what if an orchestra could be formed from musicians around the world who won their places by auditioning over the internet?
“We thought the idea had legs,” says Ed Sanders, YouTube marketing manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “A feasibility study showed there was interest from users and potential partners and we were amazed at how many people were enthusiastic. People portray the classical music world as an anachronistic beast – unwilling to embrace technology or understand how a platform like YouTube can be utilised – but that wasn’t the case at all. There was already a strong set of classical music communities on YouTube: classical music is a language that transcends geographical and linguistic boundaries.”
Events moved quickly. The project was announced on December 1 and by February around 3,000 video auditions had been uploaded from 71 countries. Some places organised their submissions – in Sydney, for example, help days and instruction were offered – but the entries remained bizarrely diverse. Some candidates played valuable violins, one an ordinary upright piano; audition videos were made in rehearsal rooms, bedrooms, dormitories.
The task of evaluating the entries was very different from a typical orchestral audition, where the candidate plays anonymously from behind a screen. Vetting by partner organisations, including the London Symphony Orchestra, whittled the applicants down to 200 finalists and then the YouTube community voted for the 90 or so winners. The orchestra’s personnel will assemble from 30 countries, from China to Colombia, Malaysia to Mexico.
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| Networking YouTube audition video by Calvin Lee |
Even Michael Tilson Thomas, who will be conducting the Carnegie Hall concert, has little idea what to expect when the orchestra meets for the first time. “After Leonard Bernstein passed away,” he says, “a memorial concert was given by players from orchestras he had worked with in Vienna, London, New York, and so on. I gave my downbeat and they came in with about six different attacks, because there was no agreement where ‘now’ was. We know from their auditions that the YouTube musicians play with great heart and skill, but it isn’t clear what is going to happen when we put them together.”
The unpredictability appealed to him, however. “I especially wanted to explore the networking aspects of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, seeing what ages they would be, what nationalities – and how these very different people would connect to each other.”
Tilson Thomas has long been involved with music education. As founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, he has been working with musicians raising their skills to the highest professional standards. Through its Internet2 activities he provides teaching online and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra has naturally gone down a similar route. Online tutorials were available for all instruments and applicants having difficulties with their audition pieces.
This is where the partner organisations led the way. As well as making a guideline recording of Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony No.1 “Eroica”, which will be played at Carnegie Hall, members of the London Symphony Orchestra took part in online master classes. Kathryn McDowell, the LSO’s managing director, explains that “players who do a lot of teaching still had to prepare thoroughly, while others who are used to digital media were able to approach the task more spontaneously.”
Google, the owner of YouTube, has identified this as an area worth promoting. It will do no harm to YouTube’s public image if the Symphony Orchestra means it is seen as more than the purveyor of video clips starring skateboarding dogs (778 at the last count). Ed Sanders points out “the strength of the category you might call ‘How to ... ’ – how to mend a broken sink or how to play the guitar. One of the CEOs at Davos recently was learning Mandarin through tutorials uploaded by a professor in Beijing.”
Perhaps the most important lesson is that nobody can predict what will happen if opportunities to make music are thrown open worldwide. Darius Klisys from Marijampole, Lithuania, plays a wind instrument called the birbyne. (Try his audition video on YouTube, where he gives a nicely plaintive performance of the slow movement from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.) Klisys only put up his video audition so that more people might find out what the birbyne is, but now he is on his way to Carnegie Hall.
YouTube Synphony Orchestra plays at Carnegie Hall, New York, on April 15. www.carnegiehall.org
