How can the spirit of Web 2.0 affect us as musicians? This new spirit offers a new era of sharing your performance and creative techniques. Consider Ethan Winer's A Cello Rondo, a tour de force composed and performed by Winer and presented as a very creative video that I discovered quite by accident on the website StumbleUpon.Com. I still don't know how I got to his imaginative video, but I am glad I did. What a splendid imagination. The only shortcoming is that he should have put in thunderous applause to his bows at the end!
Years ago an academy award film An American in Paris featured concert pianist Oscar Levant performing George Gershwin's Concerto in F. In the film, Levant is not only the pianist, but the conductor, the string section, the brass section, the percussionist---the whole orchestra. You can also see a rather shaky version of Levant playing an excerpt from the concerto on YouTube (not from the movie, but from his own television show).
Levant needed a Hollywood studio and tremendous technical support to realize the fantasy of Gershwin's concerto, but Winer creates his Rondo and the imaginative video with a video camera and the Internet as the way of delivering a new work that exists not as a fantasy but as a wonderful artistic statement in its own right. The rondo form is realized visually as well as musically.
Why not make one of your own?
