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YouTube launch web-recruited orchestra
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 16 April 2009
Yeah, probably best for YouTube to concentrate its music efforts on the classical genre, given its current disputes with the UK and German song royalty collecting societies PRS For Music and GEMA.
I think the Google-owned video website can be confident that they’ll never see Johann Bach, Johann Mozart, Wilhelm Wagner, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Lou Harrison or John Cage sitting next to Pete Waterman at a press conference whining about how little royalties they’re getting from the video service. Though by my maths, the descendants of three of that little lot are still legally able to whine about such things on their (grand)father’s behalf.
Anyway, let’s not let such tedious royalty disputes get in the way of our coverage of this rather fine project which saw YouTube bring over 90 musicians from 30 different countries to New York’s Carnegie Hall earlier this week to take part in a special performance of music by the aforementioned composers, plus a new ‘Internet Symphony’ by Chinese composer Tan Dun.
The 90+ musicians were selected from an online competition where classical musicians were invited to upload a clip of themselves playing. A selection of those uploaded went to a vote, and from that a YouTube Symphony Orchestra was put together. The orchestra amassed in New York for the first time this week, and played their concert at Carnegie Hall last night.
You’ll find backstage footage from the project plus a mash-up video featuring all the uploaders who made it through to the final orchestra at www.youtube.com/symphony.
Ahead of the concert, one trombonist from Colombia who made it through, John Wilson Gonzalez, told the AFP: “It was unimaginable that I could get to play in Carnegie Hall, a mythical theatre where only the great musicians play”, while Michael Tilson-Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony music director who led the YouTube orchestra, said: “We’re going to give a terrific show at Carnegie Hall that will have some very new and different things about it, both in the way it sounds and the way it looks. But really the most important part of this is how the world out there on the internet will be experiencing that and that will be developing over time as more edits and more uploads take place”.
