YouTube just announced the winners of their 2011 auditions for the YouTube Symphony Ochestra.  Musicians were invited to post audition videos on YouTube, the public voted and I’m happy to say that the Bay Area will be well-represented with 4 new members:

Violinist Leyan (LEE-an) Lo (Stanford)

Violist Omar Shelley (SF)

Cellist Stephanie Lai (Palo Alto)

Piccolo Daniel Sharpe (SF)

The group gets together this March in Sydney for a gala concert conducted by our own MTT that will, no doubt, be seen on YouTube!

YouTube Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas

American composer John Cage’s iconic 4′33”  is climbing up the charts in Britain.  Fairly surprising for a piece that actually contains no music, only silence! The ironic artistic statement from the 50’s has become a rallying cry for Brits who object to the manipulation of the national music charts by the likes of  Simon Cowell.  The story is right here.

John Cage

Simon Cowell

The effort to make classical music more accessible continues with a provocative suggestion from a sports lover.  Why not keep a running “score” of a piece while its being played? Click here to see the original blog entry.

What's the score?

All things old are new again.  If you’re like me, you have stacks of vinyl records lying around the house.   A young colleague here at KDFC warned me last week not to throw them out.  “People will pay good money for them!”   I guess the SF Symphony agrees.  They are offering their multiple-grammy-award-winning Mahler cycle  as a deluxe box set on vinyl! Remember when we called them LPs?  Here’s a link to the symphony’s website where you can learn all about this historic release and pre-order your copy.

Mahler on Vinyl

Last week,  the world(well, maybe not the whole world) marked the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the animated TV series The Flintstones.  In doing a little on-line research (code for Wikipedia) I discovered that the famous theme song “Flintstones, Meet the Flintstones…”  was based on a little tune from Beethoven’s Sonata #17.  Take a listen:

Yabba-Dabba Beethoven

On a recent flight to D.C. I encountered one of the most beautiful and provocative tattoos I’ve seen yet.  This young woman was a piano prodigy as a child, doesn’t play much anymore but her ex-boyfriend was a tattoo artist.  She wanted to memorialize in ink some of her favorite composers for the piano.  You can easily make out the portrait of Beethoven.  The others are Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Debussy.  Interestingly, they are portrayed in the process of decomposing!

Amazing Tattoo

Joining the ranks of some of the UK’s most illustrious citizens past and present, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s longtime  music director, Nicholas McGegan was made an Officer of the British Empire on this year’s Queen’s Birthday Hounors List.  I asked PBO’s PR guy, Sasha Hnatkovich if this meant we get to call him “Sir” Nic.  Sasha said no, he is now officially Nicholas McGegan, OBE- but stay tuned!

Congrats Nic!

An orchestra of laptops?  Why not?  At Stanford, Professor Ge Wang runs the CCRMA, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Is this the wave of the future?  Computers are precise, can produce just about any sound and they don’t get tired like, say, a trumpeter.  Add people to the mix and you add emotion, intention, and expressiveness.  Wang says, “You pull these elements together and then see where the intersection is”.  Click here to listen to Slork which is an acronym for Stanford Laptop Orchestra.

During his 4 month residency at Recology San Francisco back in 2007, young Bay Area composer Nathaniel Stookey was inspired to write Junkestra, a 3-movement piece for percussion instruments improvised from stuff he found at the dump! Stookey assembled what he called “a sonorous collection of pipes, pans, bottles, deck railings, bike wheels, bathroom fixtures and shopping carts”.  Junkestra has already been performed many times to great acclaim and you can hear it next when members of the SF Symphony take up these, uh, instruments to play it on May 9 at 2pm.  Click here for more.

Stookey

That’s the nickname for a beautiful gilded harpsichord built especially for Philharmonia Baroque’s maestro, Nicholas McGegan.  One of the cool things about this instrument is that it has two sets of legs so it can be one height when Nic is playing sitting down and higher when he is playing and conducting.  Here’s a photo: