Florida Keys
Brian Wise visits the groundbreaking New World Symphony in its high-tech home in Miami, Florida
The Miami Beach that most visitors know – the one flush with swank art deco hotels, sceney nightclubs and skimpy swimwear – appears to be alive and well. Evenings on Collins Avenue bring out a parade of bronzed women and muscle-bound men slipping out of exotic cars and into velvet-roped lounges. By day, the party atmosphere moves to the beach, where adjacent hotels pump out hip-hop beats and serve pricey cocktails to guests. Seemingly parachuted into this frolic is the New World Symphony (NWS), a training orchestra with a 35-week concert series, co-founded by artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas. The orchestra comprises 87 musicians, primarily recent conservatory and music school graduates. Each year, some 1,200 to 1,500 applicants vie for 20 to 30 open slots; most stay on for two to three years. To the casual observer, they are here for one reason: to prepare for careers as orchestral musicians.
But as the NWS turns 30 years old this year, it has evolved into something larger: a hybrid of a technology institute, think tank and laboratory for music education. Most of this activity takes place within the New World Center, a bright and airy facility designed by architect Frank Gehry, which opened in 2011 to the tune of $160m (£96m). It features a concert hall with vineyardstyle seating for 756 patrons, multimedia technology and multiple stage setups.
The centre’s façade includes a 7,000-squarefoot projection wall that displays Wallcasts – live concert simulcasts – to an adjoining 2.5 acre public park ringed by 167 speakers. Though solidly traditional by Gehry standards, the hall design is moulded to the NWS’S mission, with sleek rehearsal rooms and a rooftop garden.
The technical, and perhaps philosophical, nerve centre is a computer-lined production booth high above the auditorium, where a sevenperson team includes four videographers who shoot and edit video and create animations that are beamed onto five, curvilinear acoustic ‘sails’ that line the hall.
Technology pervades numerous other areas as well, including online video projects and distance learning activities. ‘I am increasingly becoming a kind of executive producer here with a lot of the fellows who are working on presentations,’ Tilson Thomas tells a small group of journalists who gather in a top-floor patrons’ lounge adjacent to his studio. Concert lighting design is a particular interest to Tilson Thomas, who may ask for different shades of blue to highlight distinct timbres in the strings, or draw attention to otherwise overlooked solo parts.
At a Saturday night concert of Dvo ák, Ginastera and Tchaikovsky, the audience is greeted with stylised palm leaves beamed onto the acoustic panels, later replaced by succinct programme notes. Backlighting morphs between shades of green and beige. This is the NWS’S annual ‘Side-by-side’ concert, in which 46 teenage musicians from underrepresented backgrounds in Brazil, Colombia and South Florida are invited to play with the orchestra, cost-free. It is a big and boisterous performance.
There are no bow ties in the NWS, and fellows learn how to perform not just for patrons in the hall’s steeply-raked seats but for the cameras. There are 14 robotic and fixed-position cameras in the hall, from which some 700 shots are assembled for a typical Wallcast production, up from 400 when the hall opened. ‘It’s a constantly developing vocabulary,’ notes director of video production Clyde Scott.
Howard Herring, the New World Symphony’s president and CEO, says the projection wall was the lynchpin in convincing city officials to turn over two car parks for development a decade ago. ‘I said, “This is the deal: We’re going to make a drive-in movie theatre for classical music”,’ Herring says of one early conversation. ‘This is about the architecture of engagement and facing out to the community. At that point they begin to get it.’ (The city retains partial control of the park, and shows films and video art on the wall when the NWS isn’t performing.)
My visit in late April coincides with the National Performing Arts Production
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New World Symphony fellows learn how to perform not just for the patrons in the hall but DOVRBIRU WKH cameras
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Workshop. In a ‘Town Hall’ masterclass, Tilson Thomas coaches musicians from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s youth ensemble, and from the Nashville Symphony’s ‘Accelerando’ programme. The three venues are linked via Internet2, and using the New World Center’s technology known as Lola (Low Latency Audio visual streaming system) that enables sound and images to be transported in a few milliseconds.
Even more striking is a performance by
NWS fellows of Ives’s An Unanswered Question. While a dozen string players assemble in the roof garden, a woodwind quartet sits in a lobby mezzanine two floors below, and a trumpet player is stationed in the auditorium. All three groups are linked by fibre-optic cameras and microphones and the resulting performance is stitched together in a surrealistic live video. Ives’s enigmatic work seems flown in from the future.
NWS officials hope that fellows will carry this technological knowhow into their professional lives. ‘If you think about the artistic life for a musician within an orchestra, there’s not a lot of opportunity for them to stretch themselves,’ says John Keiser, the NWS’S executive vice president and provost. ‘A lot of them do it outside of the orchestra. But it would be great if the benefit of all of their ingenuity and innovation and creativity accrued to the orchestra.’
Tilson Thomas echoes this point. ‘More and more of the fellows – and alumni – are coming up with all kinds of original ideas of their own,’ he says. ‘Increasingly they are finding their own ways of carrying ideas forward and shaping them according to where they are living and what their situations are.’
Besides giving some 70 to 80 concerts a year, each NWS fellow is required to participate in community projects and take an entrepreneurship training course, developed by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. ‘The Independent Musician’ aims to build leadership skills that can be applied towards business partnerships. As a final project, fellows organised 20 performances this past spring in venues including an animal shelter, a senior centre and even Everglades National Park.
The latter programme, dubbed ‘Bach in the Wild’, was the brainchild of Roman Yearian, a violinist from Washington State. Yearian had spent the previous year working as a volunteer ranger at Big Bend National Park in Texas. ‘From visiting parks across the country, I noticed how it’s a very visual experience,’ he explains. ‘I was interested creating in an aural experience that would allow people to use other senses to appreciate the natural resources.’
Technology also played a role in Yearian’s path to New World. Feeling burnt out, he had taken a year off the violin, and lacked a teacher. When he eventually decided to audition for the NWS, he prepared by watching online instructional videos that the organisation provides to potential applicants. ‘They went through all of the things that they listen out for,’ he says. ‘I basically used that exclusively to prepare for my audition here.’ Yearian has since left the NWS to take a position in the Florida Orchestra, starting this autumn.
‘‘ The strongwilled 73-yearold Michael Tilson Thomas is very much at the heart of this sprawling institution ’’
Much anecdotal evidence suggests that
NWS alumni are spread throughout North American orchestras. Douglas Rosenthal, a trombonist in the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, says he is one of nine musicians in his 62-member orchestra who are NWS alumni. He credits the leadership training at New World in preparing him for his current role. ‘They offer so much along the lines of how to be a good citizen in the community and among your colleagues, how to nurture relationships with big supporters and board members,’ he says. ‘And, of course, that’s in addition to all of the artistic stuff.’
The Chicago-bred Rosenthal adds that while his fellowship, from 2009-12, enabled him to ‘buckle down and gear up for auditions,’ Miami Beach seemed ‘strange’ at times. ‘To suddenly be among palm trees and people who spend five hours a day at the gym and have seven cars in their garage, that was… different,’ he says, with a laugh. ‘But it was fun.’
Today, each NWS fellow receives a $500 (£381) weekly stipend, optional student loan deferments and a furnished apartment. The orchestra is not unionised, though several fellows maintain that this isn’t the source of any friction. Indeed, Tilson Thomas says that the expansive rehearsal schedules are a draw for some soloists, including pianist Yuja Wang and violinist Gil Shaham, who come to try out new repertoire without feeling rushed.
Strong-willed and detail-focused, the 73-yearold Tilson Thomas is very much at the heart of this sprawling institution. As he prepares to step down as the San Francisco Symphony’s music director in 2020, questions inevitably emerge about his future at the NWS. ‘That’s not something I can really control,’ Tilson Thomas says. ‘But the fact that there are as many musicians who come here as coaches, and some wonderful young conductors, in that sense, the continuity is there.’ He cites two regular guests as potential candidates: Louisville Orchestra music director Teddy Abrams and New York Philharmonic assistant Joshua Gersen.
Tilson Thomas is then reminded of a colourful episode from the NWS’S early days, before the New World Center, and even before its home in the art deco Lincoln Theater. For a brief time, it was based in a multi-purpose community centre. Leonard Bernstein had come to lead masterclasses and a rehearsal of Rimskykorsakov’s Scheherazade. During a soft passage in the third movement, a worker suddenly barged in and yelled, ‘Everybody out, we have a bingo game to set up for!’
‘That,’ says Tilson Thomas, ‘was a unique experience for Bernstein.’