Side-By-Side
Each year, the New World Symphony offer advanced instrumentalists (7-12th grade) an opportunity to participate in its Side-by-Side Ensemble. Student musicians will receive one-on-one training with NWS Fellows. Student musicians accepted into the Ensemble will participate in sectionals, rehearsals and a concert with NWS Fellows. The students share the New World Center’s stage and develop musical relationships with the Fellows as they rehearse and perform music of the highest caliber.
In 2021, this longstanding tradition was put in jeopardy. How would over 30 middle and high school students be able to participate in the Side-By-Side program while in quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic? Enter digital technology and modern ingenuity. New World Symphony brought on Jonathan David Kane to take video submitted by each member of the symphony orchestra performing Maurice Revel’s Bolero to a click track, and digitally place the performers side-by-side. The performance was streamed as a Webcast concert in May of 2021.
Project 305
In 2017, the New World Symphony - in partnership with the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation and MIT Media Lab - launched a new community outreach program they called Project 305, inviting inhabitants of Florida’s Miami-Dade County to capture and upload digital video and audio samples of their Miami perspective. More than 1000 submissions and over 50 interviews were gathered through this initiative in just over 100 days from distinct neighborhoods all over the region.
This crowd-sourced material was incorporated into an original multidisciplinary work entitled Miami in Movements by filmmaker Jonathan David Kane and Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer Ted Hearne.
Miami in Movements is a symphonic documentary exploring the Miami identity in six movements. It was performed and projected live by the New World Symphony, led by Michael Tilson Thomas on Feb 22, 2018. The film is made up of five separate and synchronized video channels, projected onto the walls of the New World Center concert hall, above a full symphony orchestra.
Making the Right Choices
To honor the 100th birthday of avant-garde American composer John Cage, New World Symphony put together a three day celebration consisting of performances that spanned the four decades of Cage’s work. Jonathan David Kane was contracted by New World Symphony to document the making of this monumental performance series. JDK later worked with artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas and VP of NWS Media Clyde Scott to co-direct and edit several concert films that were created from footage captured of the performances. Each of the films was structured using non-traditional editing technics that can be likened to Cage’s music theories.
