Live blog: Talking About Creativity with MTT, John Adams, Mason Bates
3:19pm – Ed Sanders: that’s right, it’s about options. The music in its purest form doesn’t need to be complicated, the purity will always make it great, but it’s the story that gets wrapped around the content itself that is so interesting and has such potential. Think of moves: the fan communities, the DVD add-ons, the documentary on the making off, etc., etc., it helps people dive in.
3:14pm – Margo Drakos: Technology supports the live experience. It gives options. You have to use the media of your time.
3:12pm – Just as you work on your tool, the instrument, to present music in the best way, you have to work on using the tools of technology in the best way to present music.
3:10pm – Margo Drakos – these issues are not unique to orchestras, this hits a lot of industries. Change is hard. Might have hit the orchestral world earlier.
3:07pm – Ed Sanders: for us, this is success. We have the platform, introduced a way of using it, but now others take the model and run with it. These days, the cost of experimentation is low, compared to years past. “Developers are cheap. You can pay them in beer and pizza.”
3:05pm – Margo Drakos – some orgs are taking the YTSO model and translating it to their local environment. Detroit Symphony is one example, using mobile technology, live webcasting, being incredibly open. Also, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
3:02pm – There are a lot of passionate classical music fans, but they are incredibly fragmented. Spread all over the world.
2:58pm – 33 million+ people watched the YouTube Symphony. It was the biggest streaming event of the time. Bigger than U2.
2:54pm – Ed Sanders – classical music can be a bit walled off. MTT told him – “All you need to know to love classical music is that you’re alive.” That seems fundamentally at odds with how young people are presented with classical music today. Fundamentally, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (YTSO) was about giving young people a chance to do something they usually wouldn’t get to do, and give people who usually wouldn’t get to watch a concert the ability to do so.
2:50pm – Margo Drakos’ personal experience as a musician inspired her to examine how to shape the future of music through technology. To examine the doom and gloom, and “the crisis” that everyone talks about. Use the tools of our time to expand the reach of music.
Live Blog – Spotlight #1
2:42pm – Mason Bates: It’s true, there is a vibe to these spaces. There is a connotation to it. One person told Mason Bates, writing for orchestra is so bourgeois. Mason Bates believes the wrapping could be changed, without changing the music. Orchestras are for everyone, just listen to the music.
2:35pm – John Adams: There is something arbitrary about the setup and size of the orchestra. But why not 30 oboes? Composers are always interested in trying new sounds. Instruments have changed so much through the centuries and instrumentalists can do so much more now. Gives more options. That said – the orchestra does have limits. One limit is it has an iconic cultural signal. When you heard “the orchestra” – it sounds like “Culure” with British accent. [audience laughs} Largely the only classical music you hear on the radio is pleasant-sounding music from the 19th century. “The orchestra” has a certain cultural connotation. Young people hear it and think that’s not my world. As a composer, you say, I’m going to join that world and make it fresh. In the end, I think the orchestra has enormous sound potential. That’s why he composers for orchestra and is not a rock musician.
2:31pm – Mason Bates found in the radio communications that the meaningful things are the everyday things. How’s the weather? How’s it going? This is life. When we are apart, it gives those things great meaning. We are not saying everyday “I have kissed the face of God.”
2:28 pm – John Adams: Music is above and beyond, more than anything, the art of feeling. We are in the business of communicating feeling.
2:25pm – Mark Clague: one way to be a Maverick is to annoy the audience, but both of you embrace the audience. Is that between you and the page or do you imagine a listener early on? John Adams: I can’t believe people ask this question. It shines an interesting light on how people think about contemporary music that a composer would not think about the listener.
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