Beatboxing Bach featuring Kevin Olusola from Pentatonix

What happens when you get a teenage piano whiz and the 24-year-old, multi-talented winner of NBC's The Sing-Off in a rehearsal room together? Beatboxed Bach, that's what — courtesy of our friends over at From the Top, who got 15-year-old pianist Kader Qian and the 23-year-old cellist/vocalist/YouTube star Kevin Olusola together for their own riff on the Goldberg Variations.



The Recycled Orchestra


Landfill Harmonic film teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.

Landfill Harmonic is an upcoming feature-length documentary about a remarkable musical orchestra in Paraguay, where young musicians play instruments made from trash. For more information about the film, please visit facebook.com/landfillharmonicmovie.

Classical Music and the Movies

Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem
Hear Verdi’s Dies Irae in the movies Battle Royale and Water Drops on Burning Rocks. 




 A great “power” song, people all over the world, even those who dislike classical music, appreciate this work. Verdi’s Dies Irae is arguably the most well known and recognizable movement of the work. Although, many classical music lovers can tell you the name and composer of the piece, the great majority of the world cannot. Its heart pounding rhythms and driving melodies are truly awe inspiring.  


Do Orchestras Really Need Conductors?


Does This Guy Matter? Conductor Leonard Bernstein during rehearsal with the Cincinnati Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 1977.


Have you ever wondered whether music conductors actually influence their orchestras?

They seem important. After all, they're standing in the middle of the stage and waving their hands. But the musicians all have scores before them that tell them what to play. If you took the conductor away, could the orchestra manage on its own?

A new study aims to answer this question. Yiannis Aloimonos, of the University of Maryland, and several colleagues recruited the help of orchestral players from Ferrara, Italy.

They installed a tiny infrared light at the tip of an (unnamed) conductor's baton. They also placed similar lights on the bows of the violinists in the orchestra. The scientists then surrounded the orchestra with infrared cameras.

When the conductor waved the baton, and the violinists moved their bows, the moving lights created patterns in space, which the cameras captured. Computers analyzed the infrared patterns as signals: Using mathematical techniques originally designed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Clive Granger, Aloimonos and his colleagues analyzed whether the movements of the conductor were linked to those of the violinists.

The scientists hypothesized that if the movement of the conductor could predict the movements of the violinists, then the conductor was clearly leading the players. But if the conductor's movements could not predict the movement of the violinists, then it was really the players who were in charge.

"You have a signal that is originating from the conductor, because he is moving his hands and his body," Aloimonos explained. "And then the players, they perceive that signal, and they create another signal by moving the bows of the violin appropriately. So you have some sort of sensorimotor conversation."

(The research study is part of a larger project where Aloimonos is trying to figure out if human movements share something in common with human language; he suspects both are not only governed by a grammar, but that both may be based on similar processes in the brain.)

Aloimonos said the study found that conductors were leading the violinists — the movement of the conductors predicted the movement of the violinists, not the other way around.

But the study found more: The scientists had two conductors lead the same orchestra. One was a veteran who exercised an iron grip over the violinists. The other was an amateur.

"What we found is the more the influence of the conductor to the players, the more aesthetic — aesthetically pleasing the music was overall," Aloimonos said.

Music experts who listened to the performance of the orchestra under the control of the two conductors found the version produced by the authoritarian conductor superior. Remember, these experts didn't know which version was being led by the veteran conductor and which by the amateur. All they heard was the music.

Kennedy Center's New Organ No Longer A Pipe Dream