Here’s some more great news in the musical geekery world! Has anyone else heard about San Francisco Symphony’s new Keeping Score program? This is great stuff. As the SF Chronicle puts it:
“[Keeping Score] is an undertaking that will allow music lovers to crawl inside the heads of the composers; ...peer at the score while a pointer marks the place being played; become historically immersed in the time and place in which the music was introduced; ...and at the same time listen, listen, listen.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
A few weeks before every concert, they start playing the pieces on the radio . Local classical stations I guess, NPR… that sort of play. Each time, there are discussions about different aspects of the pieces, interviews between Music Director Michael Tilson-Thomas and instrumentalists he knows. Then they do a video broadcast on PBS – documentaries, biographies of composers (check local listings). Finally (and this is my favorite bit), they set up a website for the pieces. Not a mom and pop website like you’re used to, either. This is a high-quality, information packed flash dealie. A veritable cornucopia of music geekery.
Listen to the piece while reading about the programmatic aspects. Watch the score scroll by as you watch a video of the orchestra playing it, each measure highlighted as you go. Interesting information is represented as colored blocks in the score. Click on one to see an interview with a particular player (“interview with trombonist John Doe on the role of the horns in this piece”), a discussion on the music theory behind the passage, perhaps a historical tidbit, or a ‘parody’ explanation (parody is music history speak for “plagiarized”). Musical notation can be moused-over, to see an explanation of “pp” or “adagio”. There are mini-interviews with music director Michael Tilson-Thomas. There is so much information to geek out on, it’s unreal. The first time I saw this site, I think I wet my pants.
Go on. Check it out. Their pilot project is Tchaikovski’s 4th symphony. Enjoy! Now this is the kind of thing I like to see - getting audiences more involved in the stuff that give classical music such depth!
