“

Before the New York Philharmonic presented its first concert of the season in Central Park last week, the executive director of the orchestra had an announcement: Audience members could vote for an encore from the evening’s soloist by text message. The choices were a Chopin étude or, in honor of the guest musicians from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, a traditional Chinese melody.

The Chinese melody won, and so did marketers for the soloist, the piano virtuoso Lang Lang. Voters swiftly received a reply offering a discount to “pre-order” his new CD set, “Live in Vienna,” and an invitation to follow him on Facebook.

”

— (via NYTimes)

Jul 21

The Heart Chamber Orchestra plays music generated from their heartbeats, in front of a screen with visualizations based on the same. This must be an amazing experience live.

You can see another video with more explication on the Heart Chamber Orchestra’s site.

(via Everyday Listening)

I know that classical music isn’t usually the focus of this blog, but this video is too fun to not post. Conductor (and according to Google, motivational speaker) Itay Talgam describes the different kinds of relationships between conductors and orchestras, with a set of fantastic videos of various composers.

You’ve got a free 20 minutes, right?

(via Resources for studying sound recordings)

Bravo Gustavo is a new game from the LA Phil celebrating the start of Gustavo Dudamel’s term as conductor. It’s really two games: one is a browser game like a sort of orchestral Guitar Hero, the other is an iPhone game that lets you swing your phone around to “conduct” the orchestra (basically just advancing through a recorded track with every swing of the “baton”).

It is amazing that classical music is entering this space; the gameplay in the two games could use a little cleaning up, but they are extremely impressive efforts to see coming from an organization like the LA Phil.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

samreich:

The Portsmouth Sinfonia, otherwise known as the World’s Worst Orchestra, does their rendition of the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  Yes, this is a real orchestra.

After teaching my class on noise yesterday, this seems like a great example of how to blur the lines between music and noise on a different axis: people who are trying to play correctly, but they can’t really, but the point is that they can’t. Certainly unsettling to listeners in different ways than more “noisy” noise.