In 2007, Knight Foundation granted $5 million to the New World Symphony to create the Knight Media Center, helping NWS capitalize on technology and explore new performance formats. Today, Knight Arts’ classical music journalist Greg Stepanich explores some of the initiatives created from the grant…

The New World Center is a welcoming home to recording technology as much as it is live music.

Virtually every room has some sort of equipment that will preserve the performances made there, and officials there tell me they want to use that for educational outreach. Specifically, later this year the organization plans to start a video archive of master classes given at the academy, which then will be posted on the Internet for anyone to use.

I think this is a fine idea. Among the many other things that YouTube provides is a treasure trove of rare video that otherwise has been in places too inconvenient for people to reach. That includes master classes, and there are any number of moving examples on the site, such as one showing the great Arthur Rubinstein, virtually blind but still completely engaged, working with a young pianist in the First Ballade of Chopin.

Rubinstein tells the pianist that the music is supposed to be noble, and just that little piece of advice puts us in touch with an older tradition of music making and teaching, in which a good reason for studying music was soul maintenance. Just seeing that bit gave me renewed insight into Rubinstein’s art and his motivations, as well as something to think about when I was at the piano myself. Effective master classes do this for everyone who’s interested, and each season provides opportunities for striving musicians to get mentoring from the greatest musicians on the world scene, many of whom will give a few sessions while in town for an appearance, as Renee Fleming did last year at the University of Miami.

Up north in Boca Raton, pianist Gary Graffman and composer Gunther Schuller have given master classes in the past weeks, which put students in touch with two musicians who have been a major part of much of the American classical music world for decades. You can’t fabricate experience like that, and I’m sure their lessons will stick with their audiences for the whole of their musical lives.

The New World will be able to draw the finest players in the world, as it has for years, and being able to go to its site and watch a few videos of someone like Fleming offering a little tidbit of advice about voice production will pay repeat benefits for its viewers. I’m hoping that they’ll archive the classes according to the music discussed and played as well as by the performer.

It would be marvelous, for instance, to be mulling over a problem in fingering for one of the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier preludes and fugues, and then go to the archive to see whether any recent New World visitor had touched on this. If so, you’ve got an instant high-end lesson, not to mention the help you get simply from hearing someone else struggling to make great music out of the pieces they’re working on.

It would be particularly beneficial for people like me who no longer have regular lessons. Part-time players everywhere could put together their own patchwork of performing insight from any number of remarkable musicians, and that would make a performance career consisting only of occasional noodling at the instrument much more rewarding.

The idea also fulfills the mission of the New World as a teaching institution and seems to me a most generous way to share the wealth. A “music meeting house” it is, as Michael Tilson Thomas has said, and that spirit of genuine warmth, friendliness and genuine involvement in the vital group project at hand is one that keeps the vital tradition of passing on the lessons of music very much alive.