One of the latest wave of so-called Internet memes -- trends that spread rapidly to millions of Internet viewers, generally through links to YouTube -- involves making music in public spaces. You’ve seen them: the moments when train stations full of people break into song and dance; the musicals in the food court or grocery store. They're monuments of artificial spontaneity, framed by cell-phone and video cameras pulled out to document a moment created solely for the purpose of being documented.A lot of these memes are advertisements (T-Mobile was responsible for the one in Liverpool Station). Yesterday, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra got in on the act. To spread the word about its upcoming performances involving members of the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program (March 25-28) they costumed the young artists as grocery-store workers and set them loose in a Whole Foods to wreak the “Brindisi” from Verdi's 'La Traviata' on an unsuspecting populace."
I, for one, like flash mobs--"artificially spontaneous" though they may be--and I particularly like this staged eruption of opera in a Whole Foods. Classical music may have an "uneasy relationship" to public spaces--Midgette careful to mention, as I knew she would, Mozart as loitering deterrent in London and Joshua Bell in the D.C. Metro, the latter of which I kind of wrote a poem about--but this can't hurt, it seems to me, even if no one does know how to react to it.
HERE'S THE VIDEO:
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