Jesse Rosen welcomed everyone by stating that the theme of the conference is the New Reality. He talked about Daniel Hudson Burnham, the architect who designed Orchestra Hall and prepared “The Plan of Chicago,” which laid out plans for the future of the city, including the lake-front park. Jesse then described the “bean sculpture” in Millenium Park, officially known as Millenium Cloudgate.
According to the Millenium Park website, “Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.”
His point was that the “bean sculpture” reflected the skyline of Chicago in a new way — in a way that we all should explore and embrace as we go forward.
The keynote speaker was Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation. He talked about a John Cage concert he went to while a student at Wesleyan University. The concert included a piece involving ball bearings – it was “an epiphany” for him in terms of what music is – it opened his mind to many things.
Ibargüen is a journalist and former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald. He related how he was talking with Howard Herring from the New World Symphony and they began drawing parallels between newsrooms and orchestras.
How can music survive in an MP3 world? What is the new business model for newspapers as they’ve given their product away on the Internet?
He told the story of watching the election returns with his wife, who received a message on her Blackberry – it was from Obama! He considers the Obama campaign to have been brilliant in their use of new technology to build community – his wife felt personally connected to his victory that night because of her message from Barack!
Ibargüen talked about www.spot.us, a website for free-lance journalists launched in October 2008 in San Francisco which is building community in a way that formerly only experts did. He mentioned the YouTube Orchestra (see Polyphonic’s first-hand article about this experience) as an amazing new concept, and the Magic of Music initiative of the Knight Foundation in 1994 in Florida.
Ultimately, he questioned the authenticity of news that comes from bloggers and citizen activists rather than established news organizations. In the past, a newsroom was insular and a finished newspaper had thousands of eyes going over it before it was published – now it goes out on the Internet. Similarly, music composition can incorporate everything, and the digital experience is creating a totally different consumer mindset – for both music and the news.
Click here for a complete transcript of Alberto Ibargüen’s remarks.
