Goat Rodeo Sessions

11 November 2011 by Bill Parsons | 0 comments

Yo Yo Ma

A truly inspiring musician, Yo Yo Ma has raised the bar of musicianship to include great musicians from outside the classical music world. The Goat Rodeo Sessions is another in an ever elongating line of reinvention collaborations.

High Level Musicians

High levels of musicianship and technical prowess are not exclusive to classical and jazz. It can be heard in all kinds of music from all over the world. And at this point of time, different kinds of music are blending together to produce endless hybrids that bridge remote cultures and share with audiences the joy of its product.

Social Media

In the second half of the attached video the musicians are interviewed by a woman from Google. And she asks them if social media has influenced them as artists.

Their response was interesting. They seemed reluctant or unaware of the effect of social media on them. It’s a good question, though manipulative and self-serving, and perhaps this was why the musicians moved away from it. The two youngest players, mandolinist Chris Thile and vocalist Aoife O’Donovan admitted with pride to not having Facebook accounts.

I myself have been moving away from Facebook, and never went to Twitter, as I don’t have a cell phone. However, both are an integral part of many peoples’ lives. The mainstream is always a different animal from the world of artists. But the mainstream is huge and its force is everywhere and although an artist may not practice social media many artists do. And thank god for that because it makes available for us the product of collaborations we wouldn’t get to see otherwise.

In the years to come it will be interesting/disheartening to see if the corporate mentality of everything for profit will take over and only commercials will fund the existence of anything on youtube. And we’re back to watching television. Oh, the horror.