Critic Alex Ross has a great article on the salutary impact of the Web on classical music in this week's New Yorker called The Well-Tempered Web. He provides this in evidence:
... 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. Not since the fifties, when Leonard Bernstein walked across a gigantic blown-up score of Beethoven’s Fifth on the TV show “Omnibus,” has there been such a vividly intelligent introduction to some of the fundamentals of classical music. Tilson Thomas is Bernstein’s most faithful and hopeful follower, and with these programs he is performing radical acts of demystification. ...
But also cautions:
... Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the “Snakes on a Plane” rule: things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming godsends for a kind of music that has always struggled to find its place in American culture. At the end of such bouts of giddiness, classical music somehow always winds up back where it started, in a state of perpetual fret. ...
Link: The New Yorker. Ross's blog is, The Rest Is Noise.
This is a must-read piece for music-oriented pubcasters, especially with regard to how the Net enables mini-communities to thrive. There are lessons to be learned here for web strategies. --Dennis
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