****Forwarded message from Laudan Nooshin <[log in to unmask]>****
City University London
Music Department
Ethnomusicology Research Seminar Series
Thursday May 21st, 2-4pm
in room AG09 (College Building, entrance on St. John’s Street)
All welcome.
Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway, London
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a social experiment gathering
“professionals and amateur musicians of all ages, locations and
instruments” through the mechanism of the internet. Actively promoted
by international classical music personalities such as Tan Dun and
Lang Lang, YouTube users were urged in late 2008 to submit audio-
visual clips of themselves for private judging as well as “democratic”
voting to form a physical orchestra that played together for the first
time in April 2009, New York. This paper examines the economic,
technological and cultural motivations behind the YouTube project, its
execution, as well as its longer-term implications. In particular, I
look at the convergence of new and old media paradigms through the
performance of music on the internet, as well as the performance of
the internet through the appropriation of music as a cultural symbol.
In the course of the latter, I investigate the politics of classical
music promotion at large in the emergence of an (arguably) false sense
of democracy created by the seeming transparency and level playing
field of the internet, as well as the myth of music as “a universal
language.” In the case of the former I will look at short-duration and
low-resolution audio-visual formats that have come to acquire –
through the emergence of what I call a YouTube culture – an aesthetic
of deliberate amateurism and user-generated immediacy. Both
discussions contribute to greater debates surrounding the construction
of virtual places and communities vis-à-vis offline, real-life music-
making – a development which is rapidly changing the face of music
practice today.
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Dr J. P. E. Harper-Scott
Lecturer in Music
Department of Music
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, Great Britain
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Music/jpeh-s.html
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