Engaging Fanfares from Toronto
New media, new rules of engagement -- or rather, new opportunities for engagement. The Toronto Luminato Festival of the Arts did just that recently when they invited the world to help shape their event.
The Luminato Festival turns the streets of Toronto into a massive celebration of the arts in all its diversity -- music, film, drama, dance, art, literature, design and more. As their website states "Luminato embraces three key programming principles: collaboration, accessibility, and diversity."
They employed those principles to select a fanfare for the event. Composers could submit videos of groups playing their original fanfares for consideration. The top three submissions were put to a vote.
The fanfares were posted on YouTube as well as embedded in the Luminato site. Visitors voted and the fanfare chosen through a ballot. You didn't have to be a member of Luminato to vote, or a Canadian citizen, or anything.
The fanfare was chosen through collaboration with the Internet audience and made accessible through the same. Now that's staying true to your principles!
It not only presented three new compositions to the world. It also let the world respond to them. Now that's an exciting concept.
Below are two of the finalists, the bottommost is the winning composition, the Majestic Fanfare in E-flat major, by Robert Johnson.
