I’ve got nothing against the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, here. As Anthony Tommasini noted in his NYT review, YouTube could have chosen to present the “YouTube International Basketball team.”
Greg Sandow, on the other hand, found it more than a little suffocating, here. But everybody seems to agree it set a good precedent. What precedent? YouTube chose to play in a concert hall, instead of organizing an event that made sense only online, where it lives.
Playing for Change has already done just that. It collected a great team of musicians from all over the world and linked them through headsets to each other’s contributions. No artist left his or her village, city square or mountain top, and yet everybody was in sync.
Divided by geography, they’re united by the rich tapestry of music they’re hearing as they make it. Had you passed by one of them, you would have seen a solo act. Only online is the global magnificence of the project apparent.
I posted it on ArtsJournal’s main page earlier in the week, but if you missed it there, here it is, a major smack down to those who think life online isolates its audiences. Here’s to the new world, more fun than the old.
Great…but no solo women??? Ooh, boo and ouch.