Stanford Business magazine

Google Goes to Carnegie Hall

MBA Student’s Idea for Online Auditions Climaxes in Carnegie Hall Concert

The year before he joined the MBA Class of 2010, Tim Lee had a cool idea. YouTube had become both a meeting place and a showcase for individuals. Why not harness the power of YouTube to join people from all over the world in a creative project?

	YouTube presented the world premiere of the Tan Dun composition "Internet Symphony, Eroica" as selected and mashed up from thousands of video submissions from around the globe.

A one-time piano and violin student, Lee came up with the idea of using YouTube to host amateur and other unheralded musicians in a virtual orchestra. They would upload their audition tapes to YouTube, which would combine them in an orchestral mashup. The best of the artists might even meet and perform in a real concert.

Late in 2007 Lee ran the idea past some of his colleagues in the London office of Google. They liked it. He presented it to a wider audience at company headquarters in Mountain View. They approved it.

Lee started calling around. “I literally cold-called places like Carnegie Hall and the London Symphony Orchestra,” he said. “There was always the chance the classical world would say ‘this is completely ridiculous,’” he acknowledges.

But it didn’t. Carnegie Hall, booked years in advance, just happened to have a free spot in April 2009. Could YouTube meet its schedule? The London Symphony also liked what it heard; it saw the project as fitting perfectly with its educational mission.

	Tim Lee, Class of 2010, explains how his idea for an online orchestra became a reality.

“I never intended to go out and find a world-famous, Oscar-winning composer,” Lee said. But when, in late spring 2008, he called Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) for advice, Tan offered to write the piece himself. The composer was busy with the Beijing Olympics through August, but he could deliver it in September. Tan’s five-minute Internet Symphony No. 1, “Eroica,” so named because it contains broad hints of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” also prominently features the theme from his Olympic victory anthem.

By then Lee had started classes at Stanford, but he managed to call Google once a week to provide direction for the project and was on hand when it was rolled out in December. YouTube viewers were invited to download the score written for their particular instruments; play along as the London Symphony Orchestra performed the piece; take online lessons taped by 25 musicians from the London Symphony; and, finally, upload their entries.

YouTube received 3,000 videos from 70 countries. Professional musicians winnowed the lot, YouTube subscribers voted, and Michael Tilson Thomas, musical director of the San Francisco Symphony, selected the final group. The more than 90 musicians will travel to New York, where on April 15 the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Tilson Thomas, will make its worldwide debut.