On January 25th, 2011, Miami Beach's New World Center opened its doors, walls, and platforms as the home to the New World Symphony. New World Symphony is an orchestral academy founded by Michael Tilson Thomas where graduate fellows play orchestral and chamber music, experiment with new distance learning methods, share, simulcast, wallcast(tm), and produce music for a wider, richer audience experience that ever before.
The experience of being at a New World concert is about watching the 5 video panels above the stage complementing the music in the hall, or it can be about noticing another audience member a few rows away in this 'intimate' space for 756. No concert-goer is more than 13 rows from the orchestra stage, since seating is arranged in 5 clusters around the performers. The experience is also about being outside the building, or being on the roof, or listening to a piece orchestrated to make use of the movable platforms that comprise the new Frank Gehry-designed hall. A long time collaborator with Gehry, Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics, has received high praise for the sound quality inside the hall.
Adjacent and facing the new hall is SoundScape, a park designed by Holland's urban designer: West 8, which allows the public to walk past and catch a glimpse of the music experience watching the live concert on a 7000 square foot and high-def "WallCast"™. The outdoor experience brings barefoot kids and dogs to experience something otherwise reserved for a ticket-buying public. A dog was heard howling in the park during a recent piccolo solo on screen.
What this embodies is a larger than lifesized mashup: it's urban | green space, it's past | future, it's sound | visual, it's soletary | collective, it's young | old, its digital | analog. Music can be experienced to each his/her own.
What will be ever more remarkable about the new space is the potential. During the opening week there was a mashup commissioned by the New World Symphony and the USC Film School, where student films accompanied New World playing Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" for a spectacular feast for the eyes and ears. Each of the 12 "pictures" was a video which made use of the unique 5 screen space inside the hall.
Considering that arts organizations are undergoing the same transformation that many companies are - engaging their new customers/audiences - with "social" comes great opportunity. You could say that this is an organization which put much thought into designing-in the "customer experience" from inception. An orchestral experience designed for tomorrow's concert goer: whether that be online, on park, behind the stage; or, perhaps another way that we've not even yet dreamt up.