Homesteading On the Final Frontier
As the calendar year winds down, there’s plenty of real news to fret over, so even the most blog-addicted new music aficionado could be forgiven for bypassing another myopic, peevish lamentation. Indulge me for a short while, though: What I’m about to tell you may change your life. If you aren’t aware of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, you should be, because it is going to save classical music.
Not, like, right away. But eventually. The YTSO’s secret? They have found a denominator so common that it makes Now That’s What I Call Music 29 look esoteric: Feel-good global interconnectedness. Have you heard Tan Dun’s contribution to the cyberliterature, Internet Symphony No. 1 “Eroica”? I’m no clairvoyant, but I can imagine exactly how that piece came about. “Picture this: We get a Chinese composer to write a piece. . . brace yourselves. . . based on a piece by Beethoven!* It’s Eastern! It’s Western! It’s old! It’s new! People all over the world will be able to hear it and play it! What’s not to love?” If George Tenet had been in San Bruno that afternoon, he would have called it a “slam dunk.”
*The only classical composer we have ever heard of.
“What’s not to love,” of course, is that taking part in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra from the comfort of your basement is a great way to trick yourself into thinking that you are involved with concert music without actually setting foot in the concert hall, rubbing shoulders with fellow listeners, seeing a real live human being play his or her instrument in the flesh, or learning anything about the tradition of classical music that is ostensibly the medium out of which, like a human ear on the back of a lab mouse, the YTSO grows. And that isn’t the half of it. Distributed “virtual” music-making’s threshold of diminishing returns is hard to locate with any precision under ordinary circumstances, but it clarifies sharply in the presence of bad music. When we hear Tan Dun’s piece, a crayon-colored pastiche of the sort that’s quite frankly beneath someone of his stature, we can point and say, “there is the threshold of diminishing returns.” This is why I say that the YouTube Symphony Orchestra will save classical music: Either it and efforts like it will make use of telecommunications technology to make the real-life experience of classical music relevant and available to larger audiences, or they will stream its digital doppelgänger across the globe until nobody can tell the difference between butter and margarine anymore and what they’ve “saved” resembles classical music in only the most superficial way. My hopes are on the former, but if I were a betting man, my money would be on the latter.