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An orchestra is pretty much the definition of togetherness – people in the same room, playing in unison. So what do musicians do when they have to self-isolate?
The answer Ben Morales Frost came up with was to create a virtual virtual orchestra, involving more than 500 musicians from across six continents.
Frost, a London-based composer came up with the idea last Wednesday, when the COVID-19 lockdown looked imminent. He and his musician friends realized that their work was likely to suffer.
"Music only exists when people play it together in the same room, and that's quite hard to achieve at the moment," said Frost.
To get around this, he decided to invite musicians from across the world to perform some music that could be shared as one performance online.
"We thought it would be quite fun to put everyone together in various rooms across the world and then combine it all into a concert," Frost explained.
The Lockdown Orchestra is largely inspired by Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir, a global phenomenon that brings together singers from around the world, where individual participants upload their audio files and then they are merged into one virtual choir performance.
This is a similar concept to the Lockdown Orchestra, where the musicians involved all send in their different audio recordings in various formats. They are then audio mixed and balanced by a score of engineers and the end result is one smooth piece of music.
Frost says one of the main challenges in putting together a performance through the screen is communication.
"In a room, you can communicate instantly with people, people can ask you questions about the music, they can say, 'How do you want me to bow this as a piece of violin music?'... or various questions about the feel of the piece, but that's taken away from you."
He added: "You have to communicate that all with the written sheet music and hope for the best."
The piece of music chosen for the virtual orchestra to perform is one that Frost composed and is deliberately uplifting and cheerful.
"This piece felt exactly right," he said. "It captured the joy, hope and sort of soaring and elation of making music."
Frost said this is just the beginning for the Lockdown Orchestra and there is potential for a similar group project involving children.
The first virtual performance by the Lockdown Orchestra will debut on
Frost's YouTube channel
on Friday evening at 20:00 (GMT).
