San Diego Youth Symphony

With the holiday season coming to a close, enjoy these highlights from the San Diego Youth Symphony, who put together a virtual presentation of Ravel’s Bolero and excerpts from Dvořák’s New World Symphony. They used the platform Smart Music to practice recording and collaboration with their peers; check out the final product here.

The theater director Peter Sellars spoke four years ago at the L.A. Phil and Barbican-sponsored “Future Play: Music Systems in the 21st Century.” He called for the democratizing of classical music and music education. “I have to ask the classical music world to respect reciprocity, which is the basis of all human interaction. And not have this one-way flow of ‘all these kids will learn to play Beethoven.’…We have to move into radical structures of reciprocity.”