April 22, 2020
Dear Friend,
“Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.”
That wonderful quote by the leadership expert, speaker and author John C. Maxwell could not have been more apt than it was last night, as the Chamber Music Society of Detroit’s CameraMusic project live-streamed – or rather
attempted
to live-stream – a concert by the ensemble QuaranTrio from Philadelphia.
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This string trio; comprised of violinist Brendan Speltz and cellist Brook Speltz of the Escher Quartet, and violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt of the Dover Quartet; are sharing stay-at-home living quarters in Philadelphia. Together, they have been playing live concerts over the Internet for a number of presenting organizations around the country, so they were a perfect choice for CameraMusic, our live-streaming project still in its early stages.
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Last night we were joined in our effort by four other chamber music presenting organizations: the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach in Florida, the Coleman Chamber Music Association and Chamber Music Monterey in California, and the Tuesday Musical Association in Akron, Ohio. The five of us each promoted the event to our audiences, and together we ensured that the trio will be paid a respectable concert fee for their performance.
It all started so well.
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The streaming “doors opened” at 7:30 P.M. with a (pre-recorded) pre-concert interview with the trio, and then shortly after 8:00 P.M. we went live.
Really
live. Not the fake live of “live-streaming” a pre-recorded concert, but actually streaming a live concert – in real time – in the same moment the musicians were performing it for us. That's not a small challenge!
After a brief hello from me, we played short, pre-recorded welcomes from Jane Levy, a board member at Coleman, and Arnaud Sussman, artistic director in Palm Beach. I then gave a brief live shout-out to our other two presenting partners, and introduced the trio itself (in complete silence, because that moment was embedded in a video “scene” I forgot to turn the sound on for).
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After that we turned it over to QuaranTrio, and the first piece on their program: the gorgeous Serenade for String Trio, Op. 10, by Ernst von Dohnányi.
Everything was going
so
well …
... until disaster struck.
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In the middle of the fifth and final movement of the Dohnányi, I looked up at my computer screen and saw that all video motion had ceased. The computer had frozen and became completely unresponsive, and I knew it was only a matter of a few seconds before the streaming buffers at Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube would run out and our stream would go dark. It felt like being in the fast lane on a five-lane highway and having the engine die on your car.
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With everyone watching.
From all over the country.
Ouch.
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Try as I might, the computer would not revive, and so in about 20 minutes with our whole team and the artists on a conference call, we pivoted to a direct live stream to YouTube from the musicians themselves in Philadelphia, rather than passing first through our system here in Detroit. Those who stuck around were able to hear the rest of a
beautiful
concert. The trio re-started the fifth movement of the Dohnányi, then played a lovely work by Chris Rogerson (written originally for Brook and Milena’s wedding), and finished with a stirring performance of Beethoven’s Trio in c minor, Op. 9, No. 3.
It was a truly spectacular concert, in spite of it all.
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But now what?
“Fail early, fail often, but always fail
forward
.”
And so we shall!
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For listeners who missed the concert, or who may have left us during the interruption, we will be working quickly today to download from Vimeo and YouTube the two separate halves of the concert, joining them together in a single archived video to be shared on our website and those of our four partnering presenters. We will send out a special email as soon as that is accomplished, and you can check our website later today or tomorrow to see the whole concert after we've posted it.
Please listen and share with others once we get that done!
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On the technical side, we think what happened last night was the hard drive on our powerful brand new live-streaming computer failed suddenly after a full day of video preparations and the start of what was a fairly demanding streaming production. In addition to fixing that in the days ahead, we will be investigating the alternative of a “virtual server,” something that involves the hourly rental of truly massive computing power from an off-site data center, where you can specify processing power, memory type and capacity, internet bandwidth, and lots of other things. We can still prepare the concerts on our local computer, but it will be far safer to do the actual live streaming remotely from a computer that’s more powerful than anything you can buy in a store.
We don't want something like this
ever
to happen again!
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On the artistic side, our CameraMusic project has captured the attention and imagination of many prominent “insiders” in the chamber music field – presenters, artists and managers alike. If we can solve the technical challenges, we are confident there will be
many
more CameraMusic concerts coming your way. This is particularly important for the musicians, because the more successful they are, the more their livelihoods have become dependent upon touring and performing income alone. All that income has simply
evaporated
in the COVID-19 crisis. CameraMusic provides a unique way for us to invite several different presenters to share with us the costs of compensating the artists at a time when we have no ticket income to support it. For this reason alone, we believe this is
really
important work.
But there’s more to it than that.
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On the audience side, we have no idea how long this COVID-19 crisis will really last. And we have no idea how long it will be before
all
of our audience members – many of whom may be particularly vulnerable to the dangers of a coronavirus infection – will feel safe enough to come back into the Seligman Performing Arts Center and our other concert halls to hear this wonderful music both “live” and “in person.” So for now, our effort to make at least the “live” part a reality seems really important to us, and, we think, to our audience as well.
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I can imagine, if things remain as unsettled in September and October as they are now, many members of our audience still may not feel safe gathering with their fellow listeners to hear our concerts. Under such circumstances, our ability to continue reaching our listeners with a robust live-streaming capacity becomes
incredibly
important. Because
nothing
matters to us more right now than your health and your safety.
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We invite you to be a part of this important CameraMusic project. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the work we are doing now will be what keeps our concerts coming, our audiences engaged, and our organization strong for many more months to come.
What can you do to help? Tune in, of course, and share with your friends! In addition, you can also make a gift to the Chamber Music Society of Detroit’s CameraMusic Fund, which is dedicated solely to the payment of artist fees and honoraria for the live online concerts we are producing. The more we have in that fund, the more artists we can support, the more listeners we can engage, and the longer we can thrive as an organization as we weather one of the most disruptive challenges the chamber music field has ever experienced.
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The Chamber Music Society of Detroit was founded in the mid-1940s by a group of people who had fled Central Europe to escape the horrors of the Second World War. As they built a new life together in the City of Detroit, chamber music was a deep and fulfilling comfort, a big part of making them whole again. Now, in 2020, we face a different kind of a crisis. But the capacity of chamber music to make us whole is no less powerful now than it was when the Chamber Music Society of Detroit was founded.
So please, join us for our CameraMusic concerts, forgive us our hiccups when they happen, and give whatever you can to help us make this project a powerful force for good during this difficult time.
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Thank you for your loyalty, and for your love of this great tradition we call chamber music.
Please be safe.
Warmly,
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Steve Wogaman, President
Chamber Music Society of Detroit
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