How Do You Create an Orchestra Using YouTube?




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It turns out all you need to play in the storied Sydney Opera House is a YouTube account and a touch of talent. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra (YSO) recently announced its list of musicians who won a spot in the orchestra. All they had to do was post a video of themselves playing a classical piece, get user votes and be great at their chosen instrument.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a crowdsourced classical orchestra enjoying its second year. Last year an entire orchestra was selected from audition videos posted to YouTube by professional players and skilled hobbyists. The musicians then met for the first time in New York, rehearsed, and performed at Carnegie Hall.

This year, applicants came from all over the world mixed both quirk and actual talent, such as a German trombone player, Ramon, buzzing out “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on a vuvuzela while wearing a tuxedo in the snow. Other anomalies include a guzheng player from Beijing or an electric guitarist from Brazil. While the orchestra is primarily made out traditional instruments like violins, horns, and percussion, it’s a testament that anyone can get involved. “Usually [an audition] is done behind a curtain. With our partners, we wanted to challenge that,” said Ed Sanders, YouTube’s Group Marketing Manager. “If you have the skill and a webcam, you should be able to give it a crack.”

While the orchestra will be performing in a traditional venue and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the widely respected music director of the San Francisco Symphony, the goal of the YSO is to open up classical music to a new, curious community. Its website has played a huge role in both drawing together a global network of professional musicians and also introducing orchestral music to younger or casual listeners.

The site, hosted on YouTube, provides online master classes, improvisations, musician profiles and human interest stories designed to intrigue amateurs and professionals. “The classical music community globally was very large but very fragmented and something that we wanted to do, as sort of an experiment, was to create a hub where people could sort of connect around a common passion,” said Sanders.

The master classes are definitely geared toward prospective players, but they offer enough historical tidbits and musical insights that they’re fun to watch even if you can’t play along. The improvisations are more clearly meant to be enjoyed as musical flights of fancy featuring bizarre or unexpected instruments — like a vocoder cello — riffing on an original piece by Mason Bates. More videos will be added as the final performance date, March 20, draws near.

For the truly uninitiated, “Experiment” allows anyone to start playing music, provided they have a webcam. The user can wave a photo or printout of the supplied QR code in front of their webcam to play different notes. They can choose from three different types of “instruments” and slide the tempo to suit their playing styles.

Mauricio Cespedes is principle violist for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and one of the musicians selected to be part of the YSO. Last year he watched the different master classes and the final performance at Carnegie Hall. Inspired by what he saw, he auditioned for the YSO this year: “I think the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is designed to bring, first of all, talented players from around the world together that represents a new generation that is connected online, that is connected through YouTube, through these powerful tools.”

What do you think of the YSO and its online hub? Is this the kind of integration that both YouTube and the classical arts need to survive? Let us know in the comments below.

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