BOSTON (AP) – Standing before a crowd of symphony music fans eager to find out what it takes to be a maestro, Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart moves his baton to the beat of a waltz, while his audience slices their own batons through the air.
Lockhart’s pupils for the day at the South Shore Music Circus aren’t the only ones privy to the conductor’s musical tips. The session is part of the content now on BostonPops.tv, a streaming Internet site offering clips from concerts and recording sessions, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with musicians.
The site was launched in November and is viewable free of charge. Orchestra officials see it as one more way to try to get the young, tech-savvy crowd to attend live concerts, by piquing their interest in orchestral music.
“If you look at the demographic of the Internet, its a younger demographic. In general, I think it’s fair to say that any arts organization is looking for a younger audience and we’re no exception to that,” Lockhart said in a recent interview from Salt Lake City, where he conducts the Utah Symphony.
The Boston Pops say they are the first orchestra to launch an Internet broadcast, and Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, says they are leading the way.
“You know there are orchestras doing podcasts and downloads and orchestras that have blogs and pages on MySpace. So there’s a lot of experimentation going on now in this area,” he said. “But I think this just takes it one more step.”
The Pops decided to develop the Web site at the same time they released their CD, “Oscar and Tony,” featuring the award-winning music of Hollywood and Broadway.
The site offers a look at recording sessions, interviews with musicians and a behind-the-scenes look at the changeover from BSO season to Pops season.
; an explanation of the wizardry behind making the American flag drop during the playing of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and commentary by Peter Fiedler, the legendary conductor’s son who is an honorary Boston Pops assistant conductor. Fiedler explains the tradition of firing the canons during the “Overture of 1812,” which he helped coordinate under Pops conductor John Williams.
In a clip about Pops recording sessions, Lockhart offers interesting morsels. For example, since the orchestra plays to an empty room during recording sessions, it’s sometimes necessary to treat the hall with sound absorbent material to imitate the presence of bodies, present during concerts.
Sara McGovern, an oboist who teaches music in Georgetown, Ill., was looking around on the Web for material to jazz up lessons about Tchaikovsky when she ran across BostonPops.tv.
So she rigged up a laptop to a television screen and showed students clips from the site of the American flag unfurling for a lesson about Sousa and patriotism.
“They get the patriotic flair and flavor from watching that flag come down and hearing people talk about the importance of it,” McGovern said.
“The musicians talk on a normal level. You know it’s like “I’m the guy next door,’ which I find works really well with kids because they’re so in the dark about what musicians do as a profession,” McGovern said.
Kevin O’Toole, a 16-year-old trumpet player at Saratoga Springs High School in New York, found out about the site from a friend. He’s attended Pops concerts in the past and says the new site makes him want to attend more.
“The idea of having the whole BostonPops.tv thing is really good because like the only other way you could really hear them or see them is really buying tickets which are kind of expensive, or getting CD’s, which not everybody does,” he said. “So, that you can go online and hear them and see them is really cool.”
By launching the site the Pops also are hoping to tap into an audience of people who can’t get to a live concert.
“If they’re sitting in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia, they’re not going to buy a ticket to the Boston Symphony next week or Boston Pops you know during the holiday,” said Mark Volpe, managing director of the BSO, who noted the Boston Pops are known far beyond Boston.
The site has seen about 70,000 users, since its inception, said symphony spokeswoman Kathleen Drohan.
The Pops have been working on changing their image for awhile now, shaking up Symphony Hall with the sounds of Ben Folds and the Cowboy Junkies during their EdgeFest series and teaming up with students from the Berklee College of Music during JazzFest.
Last summer, the orchestra learned the hard way just how powerful the Web can be when two men came to blows in the balcony of Symphony Hall during a performance of music from the movie “Gigi.” Footage of the brawl quickly made it to cyberspace, and provided fodder for plenty of late-night comics.
Francisco Noya, an assistant professor of composition at the Berklee College of Music, sees the new Web site as a way of exposing people not just to the music, but to what goes on behind the curtain.
“When you think about it, most people don’t really know what we do. They just see the final product – the concert” said Noya, who is also the resident conductor for the Rhode Island Philharmonic. “And I always found it fascinating to understand the process. What is it that we’re doing, how do we put the concert together, what does the conductor do? That’s kind of a mystery. You stand there, you wave your arms and music comes out.”
On the Net:
www.bostonpops.tv
www.bostonpops.org
AP-ES-12-16-07 1413EST
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