March, 2012

  1. Steven Winn: Contrasting and Conflicting Notions of Creativity

    As the current American Mavericks festival at the San Francisco Symphony demonstrates, there’s no one approach to creativity in the orchestral world. And Steven Winn—arts journalist and co-moderator of our live event in San Francisco this Saturday, March 17—is perfectly happy to take on all the contrasting and conflicting notions of creativity on display.

    E/C/D-sharp/C-sharp. From that taut little four-note cell, Aaron Copland spun out the material, at once dense and spacious, imploded and expansive, of his 1930 Piano Variations. Cunningly orchestrated by the composer 27 years later, the Orchestral Variations got the San Francisco Symphony’s 2012 American Mavericks festival opener off to a bracing start on March 8 at Davies Symphony Hall. It also got me to thinking about the marvel of creativity, which can feed on so little to generate so much, like some tiny, tremendously efficient micro-organism.

    An hour later, deep into Henry Brant’s 1994 orchestration of Charles Ives’ mighty 1920 Concord Sonata (A Concord Symphony), creativity had morphed into a giant daisy chain of inspiration and influence. (more…)

    Topic: Creativity | Tags: , ,
    March 14, 2012 by Beth Hondl | Comments (0)

  2. What made the YouTube Symphony successful? A Q&A with Ed Sanders of Google

    The YouTube Symphony Orchestra started out as a suggestion from a young marketing employee in London. What if…? What if we could bring together classical music enthusiasts dispersed across the globe? How could technology bring this community together? 30+ million views later, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra became an international phenomenon and in this Q&A Ed Sanders—formerly of YouTube, now Group Marketing Manager of the Creative Lab at Google—explains how that happened.

    Question: What brought about the development of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra? Was it that YouTube noticed that the genre was developing in popularity? Or what make the organization feel it would be an interesting activity to present in such a futuristic way?

    Ed Sanders: YouTube and Google have always prided themselves on having a distinctly entrepreneurial culture. This is a reflection of that. The idea came from a young marketing employee in the London office, who dreamed up the idea, pitched it, and it became reality. One of the major original data points which piqued interest was the massive yet highly fragmented existing classical music which lived online on platforms like YouTube. But the concept itself is merely one example of an ongoing demo which perhaps only YouTube could do – a manifestation of a wonderful way to showcase the access which YouTube provides, to transcend linguistic and geographic boundaries, and to continually strive to challenge the status quo.

    Question: What do you think captured the imagination of viewers about this project? Was part of it this idea that it was so accessible, available to anyone with a computer? (more…)

    Topic: Creativity | Tags: , ,
    March 13, 2012 by Beth Hondl | Comments (0)

  3. Margo Drakos: The Age of Relevance – Lessons from a world away

    In this post, Margo Drakos argues that musicians, like scientists and entrepreneurs, are the “inventors and innovators who will bring us into the future.” As a cellist turned tech entrepreneur, she certainly lives that truth and we’re looking forward to hearing her thoughts on “creativity” at our live event in San Francisco, this Saturday, March 17. Register today for our free Talking About Creativity event with Margo Drakos.

    “The souls of people, on their way to Earth, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper — often only a spark — to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer — have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity — its poets, seers, and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers, the light-bringers, way-showers, and truth-tellers, and without them humanity would lose its way in the dark.” – Plato

    Last spring and a world away this quote was read in mourning. Their numbers depleted by two, a group of journalists in Misrata, Libya gathered to eulogize a friend of mine, Chris Hondros, an world-renown photo-journalist, and his colleague, Tim Hetherington, director of award-winning Afghan war documentary Restrepo and conflict-photographer. Chris was incredibly passionate about classical music and it was the bridge that first connected us. As I transitioned from my career as a cellist into the technology space, I learned from Chris that our connection was more fundamental. Journalists, photographers, sculptors, musicians, entrepreneurs, inventors, and everyone who endeavors to interpret the humanity of which we are part, to preserve it, to share it, to move it forward, these, are the light-bringers, way-showers, and truth-tellers. We must embrace this role, not with hubris but with humility and realize that our accomplishments are not the reward for our dedication. Rather, our dedication is the price paid, and it is only a pittance, for the enormous privilege of “having been detained longer”- so that we might weave a torch.

    Musicians, no less than historians, are stewards of our culture and our history – charged with preserving and interpreting the past. Music is a constant evolving culmination of the rich repository of human culture over the past hundreds of years. This is a deep brew – blending a vast number of societies and languages, and the composer’s intentions with one’s own voice, most often in tandem with others, to form a single, unique, interdependent expression.

    Musicians, no less than journalists, are charged with bearing witness to the present and cataloguing and interpreting it for future generations. Our local and global communities need the arts, to process the world around, interpret it, share it with society, and make it personal, and thus relevant. Our tradition desires active participants and not passive observers in our society at large.

    Musicians, no less than scientists and entrepreneurs, are inventors and innovators who will bring us into the future.

    A career in the arts, be it as an orchestral musician, composer, teacher, booking agent, recording engineer, executive director, or any other capacity, is to dedicate one’s self to this set of ideals: Steward, Witness, Innovator. Just as doctors, lawyers, or engineers hue to and are bound by professional codes – so too are we as part of the artistic community. And in my mind to be a professional in the performing arts is defined less by the remuneration one receives for their craft than by the fealty to which they adhere to the noble underpinnings of our profession. Our world with its unprecedented rate of change will not be kind to those that do not recognize and balance the responsibilities of being a steward, witness and innovator.

    Much of our education and presentation of classical music focuses on great masters of the past: Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Wagner – the list goes on. We do so with good reason, because the themes and the beauty of their works transcend time and cultures. The call to action that is before us all today – is to cultivate and disseminate the resonate themes of our time, that are relevant now and into posterity. And just as artists of the past used the media channels of their time, so must we use the mediums of our time – the web, smartphones and tablets, social media and video.

    Last April, on a day’s notice via email, my childhood friends from Curtis and Marlboro who have gone on to found Brooklyn Rider and The Knights, played Mahler and Schubert at Chris Hondros’ funeral (some of his favorites). Over 2000 people attended the service in Brooklyn. Another 1000 watched for free on UStream.com joining in from Libya to Baghdad, Bagram, Beirut, Berlin and Boston. Technology enabled this music of the past to be shared with an audience that needed to grieve together, and pay tribute to a great witness of the present. Sitting in my home watching on my laptop, I felt connected to new friends watching a world away, and was deeply comforted by the haunting melodies from the great composers of the past, played magically by my old dear friends.

    –Margo Drakos

    Topic: Creativity | Tags:
    March 12, 2012 by Beth Hondl | Comments (0)

  4. John Adams: The Maverick and the Orchestra

    Where is music headed in the next twenty or fifty years? The beautiful thing is… no one knows. Just when you think an instrument (or the orchestra) may have lost its relevance to a mass audience, you’ll be surprised by where composers take it next. This post is adapted from an essay composer John Adams wrote for the book American Mavericks: Musical Visionaries, Pioneers, Iconoclasts.

    John AdamsI grew up playing the clarinet. My father was my first teacher. He had played it during the 1930s and ’40s, when Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were the pop culture stars of their day. By the time I got to college the electric guitar and heavily amplified rock music had replaced big band swing, and the clarinet was a ludicrously old-fashioned instrument. Paul McCartney used it in a song about retired people to set the tone for “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Grace Slick held an old metal clarinet in her lap for the cover of the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow. By then it had become little more than a tchotchke. But there was no clarinet on any of her songs, and none I remember on any of the other great albums from that era.

    Imagine: I thought my life in music was already foreclosed due to an error in the instrument I’d chosen at a very young age.

    But thirty years later, the clarinet is still around, and it has reappeared as an important instrument in styles I never would have imagined back in the 1960s. (more…)

    Topic: Creativity | Tags: ,
    March 9, 2012 by Beth Hondl | Comments (0)

  5. Taking a Chance on Creativity

    Professor Mark Clague, co-moderator of our live events in San Francisco, recently gave one of his classes at the University of Michigan an unusual assignment. In the spirit of John Cage, the students were asked to create a work that used silence, chance, found instruments, graphic scores (or any other John Cage-inspired technique), perform the work, and then upload a video of the performance to YouTube.

    After looking through the videos, it’s safe to say… creativity is alive and well at the University of Michigan. But what’s also striking is how comfortable these students are with these techniques. What was so revolutionary years ago is just another weapon in their creative arsenal. In their hands, it seems perfectly natural to hear the music in the making of a cup of coffee.

    For more videos, view the UMavericks channel on YouTube.

    Where will creativity lead us next?

    Topic: Creativity | Tags:
    March 7, 2012 by Beth Hondl | Comments (0)

  6. Where does creativity come from? And how does one nurture it?

    In our modern world, the creative artist is seen as the “genius” behind a great work of art. But it wasn’t always like this, as author Elizabeth Gilbert explains in this talk. After the phenomenal (and “freakish” as she puts it) success of her book Eat, Pray, Love, she faced the enormous question of what to do next. Was it possible to repeat the success of that book? How could she return to the creative process after such an experience? And how could she face the pressure of writing a “sequel”? Her answer was to turn to ancient wisdom and take a different view of creativity. One that gave more responsibility to external inspiration and less to the creative individual.

    As we gear up for our Taking About Creativity event on March 17, this is certainly food-for-thought on the nature of creativity and how artists strive to achieve it.

    Topic: Creativity | Tags:
    March 6, 2012 by Beth Hondl | Comments (0)

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