Thursday, April 3, 2003

BOOKMARK An Online Conservatory Allows Visitors to Try Their Hand at Remaking Classical Standards By BROCK READ "What's the best way to use new media to teach classical music?" asks Anthony P. De Ritis, an assistant professor of music at Northeastern University. The answer, he says, is simple: "To use the Internet like an interactive game." Mr. De Ritis does just that on a Web site that he created for the Boston Symphony Orchestra with a team of students and Ann McDonald, an assistant academic specialist at Northeastern. The "online conservatory" aims to provide a broad and engaging perspective on classical music by combining traditional biographical and analytical information with video documentaries, quizzes, and hands-on experiments. The Web site focuses on four composers whose works were featured in a program given at a series of concerts by the orchestra in February: Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, and Tan Dun. Mr. Dun's most recent composition, "The Map," was performed for the first time on that program. But the conservatory offers more than online program notes. Each featured composer is the subject of an elaborately produced documentary film that surveys his or her life and art through a marriage of images, musical excerpts, and narrations read and composed by Mr. De Ritis. The documentaries -- each of which culminates in a brief listening guide and quiz -- were compiled and edited by four of Mr. De Ritis's students with backgrounds in both music and technology. "With the Web-based documentaries, we can do more than just advertise the concert," Mr. De Ritis says. "We can make something nearly as good as a PBS documentary." He points to the Web site's video summary of John Cage's life and career, for which he and his students worked closely with the avant-garde composer's trust. "We had access to images that no one has seen before," he says. Anchoring the site is a set of interactive games that Mr. De Ritis uses to demonstrate key concepts in modern classical music. To learn more about Cage's influential methods of "considered improvisation," visitors can create their own works by selecting colored squares that represent sections of the composer's piano sonatas. To explore the role of variation in composition, visitors can toy with the tempo, key, and instrumentation of a passage from Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring." "You can play the song and then decide, What if this was in major instead of minor? What if it's trumpets instead of clarinets?" says Mr. De Ritis. The interactive features are invaluable because they demystify classical music, according to Rich Bradway, who oversees other sections on the orchestra's Web site. "If you look at the popularity of music in the world today, classical music is at the bottom," he says. "One of the things that's really cool about this is that it opens the music up to a much wider audience." Many large symphony orchestras are turning to the Internet as an educational tool, according to Oliver Theil, associate manager of communications for the San Francisco Symphony. But the Boston orchestra's online program is rare, he says, because it focuses on adult learners, not children. "Most of what we do on the Web is child-oriented," he says. "Adults still like to come to lectures and in-person events." Mr. Bradway says he would like to see the project expanded so it can become a standard reference for classical-music enthusiasts. "If it gains momentum, it could be a tool that people go to regularly to learn more about their favorite composers," he says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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