No longer content to be the online hub of video sharing, YouTube has harnessed its unique power not just to propagate, but to generate, culture in a seemingly unprecedented way.
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra made its debut at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night. At the outset, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas delivered a novel and appropriate response to the famous question of how one gets to that stage: "Upload! Upload! Upload!" Indeed, there were, alongside a number of professional musicians among the symphony of 96, a gaggle of performers with day jobs -- a surgeon, a physicist, a professional poker player -- all selected via an "American Idol"-type selection process conducted, of course, online.
And in the spirit of things, the center of the evening's program was a new work by Tan Dun, "Internet Symphony No. 1: Eroica." You can watch the whole thing in HD below.
Simple novelty? Cultural phenomenon? Harbinger of a day when musicians with symphonic aspirations convene via broadband from 96 locations around the world to collaborate in real time? What do you think?
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