In Friday’s (10/31) Washington Post, Geoff Edgers writes about the recent debut of LiveNote, “an app developed by the Philadelphia Orchestra to encourage concertgoers to toggle along to the music on their smartphones. The experiment at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is meant to make the orchestra more accessible…. This July, the Boston Symphony Orchestra made its multiscreen performance of Dvorak available in a special, marked-off section of its summer home in Tanglewood. Susan Hockfield, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology president who leads the BSO’s media and technology committee, said she was thrilled to conduct the test. She’s just not sure how she felt about the screens. ‘One of the reasons I go to concerts is for the intensity of the experience,’ she said…. The Philadelphia Orchestra rolled out LiveNote not during a paid, subscription performance, but as a test during its free college night concert held every fall.… ‘This isn’t about giving people something to do to occupy them in the hall,’ said Jeremy Rothman, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s vice president of artistic planning. ‘It’s about providing them information to appreciate the music.’ … about 20 percent of the audience connected to the LiveNote stream.”
Posted November 3, 2014
