Glenn Korff School of Music goes global with webcasting

Greg Smith (left) and Steven Cohen work in the control booth at NET during a live webcast of a DMA recital of Masayoshi Ishikawa in Westbrook Recital Hall.
Greg Smith (left) and Steven Cohen work in the control booth at NET during a live webcast of a DMA recital of Masayoshi Ishikawa in Westbrook Recital Hall.

Glenn Korff School of Music goes global with webcasting

calendar icon01 Aug 2015    

More than 4,000 unique users from all over the world watched more than 102,000 minutes of 39 concerts webcast this academic year by the Glenn Korff School of Music. In addition, 1,500 people watched more than 6,000 minutes per month of the archived videos posted on YouTube.

“It’s been a remarkably happy success,” said Glenn Korff School of Music Director John W. Richmond as he summed up the first full year of webcasting selected concerts.

The idea for webcasting began many years ago.

Richmond has been involved with the fine and performing arts group of Internet2 since before he came to UNL in 2003. Internet2 (http://www.internet2.edu) is a community of leaders in research, academia, industry and government who create and collaborate via innovative technologies.

When the Glenn Korff School of Music hired Jeff O’Brien as their information technology associate in 2012, he, along with David Bagby, the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts’ Information Technology Services Manager, began researching what other schools were doing.

The model O’Brien settled on was patterned after Indiana University’s model.

“Back in the 1980s when they started their push for the Recording School, they contacted their local PBS station and said, ‘We have this Recording School. Why don’t we use our students to record our concerts and you push them live on the radio, and that built into television and then live streaming,” O’Brien said. “That connection spoke to me because if I were a student, at this point, I would want to come to this school and be a part of this endeavor because it’s where the future of broadcasting is going. Everything is live streaming.”

The live webcasting of concerts, done in partnership with Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET), helps expand the reach of the Glenn Korff School of Music.

“The treasured partner in all of this has been NET,” Richmond said. “Most of their webcasts have been things like the Nebraska Legislature or the Nebraska Supreme Court or things like that. It’s not too surprising that when they look at the audience, they know the numbers are going to be pretty small and that the tuning in will be brief—in fact, they measure this in seconds. But the average stay on many of our webcast events is more than 30 minutes, which is simply unheard of in their webcasting experience, so it’s remarkable in that way.”

When the School received the Korff Endowment last year, they were able to move forward more quickly with their plans for webcasting.

“The start up costs are rather formidable,” Richmond said. “Then along came the Glenn Korff Endowment, and the program component provided a resource. Here was an opportunity to do something that we knew was going to be really helpful for everybody, so we used some of the endowment earnings to make this happen.”

Three cameras were installed in Kimball Recital Hall and two cameras were installed in Westbrook Recital Hall Rm. 119. Eventually, Richmond would like to have a total of seven cameras in Kimball, with two additional cameras installed in the summer of 2016 and two more installed in the summer of 2017 to include an overhead angle to zoom in on a pianist’s hands or even the score of the conductor, side stage angles and one angle that looks out to the conductor’s face and into the audience.

“We think that will be a really exciting addition to our program,” Richmond said. “All of these ideas are not original. They are the result of talking with people who have been doing this for a while and asking what they’ve learned and benefitting from their advice.”

For each concert webcast in this first year, there were two people who worked behind the scenes at NET to make it happen. Steven Cohen, a Master of Music student, was the graduate teaching assistant charged with assisting the NET webcasting technicians this year. He would read the musical score of what was being performed to help the NET technician adjust the cameras to highlight soloists or groups within the many ensembles webcast over the year.

“The experience of webcasting is like nothing else I have ever worked on from either a musical or technical perspective,” Cohen said. “I've always been enamored by television broadcasts of orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic. There is an art behind taking a piece of music and taking its magical moments and sharing those though video. I loved having the chance to share the work of the Glenn Korff School with the world.”

He also learned skills to help him as a musician.

"As a musician, learning to hone your skills as an instrumentalist is one thing, but in producing these webcasts, I have developed a skill set that has truly transformed the way I see music on a larger scale,” he said.

O’Brien likes that we are now providing this experience to students.

“We have a wonderful GTA here in Steven Cohen, who understood the technology and ran the cameras sometimes,” O’Brien said. “He had an active role. Numbers are numbers, but when a person can actually gain some traction from this experience, that’s awesome.”

Webcasting is helping to grow the audience for Glenn Korff School of Music concerts.

“If we hoped to have 300 folks attend an ensemble concert we might produce in the Kimball Hall, that’s good,” Richmond said. “But then you see another 200 people tune in via a live webcast, both locally and from far away. Suddenly you realize you’re really expanding your audience. That’s pretty great.”

Webcasting also significantly impacts recruiting.

“Now prospective students can say the person I might study saxophone with is doing a saxophone recital on a webcast,” Richmond said. “I think I’ll tune in to see how this professor plays. And then they hear Dr. Paul Haar play and they think, ‘Oh my goodness!’ Or they can do that for the Chiara String Quartet if they’re thinking of studying chamber music. This has been a great unveiling of the Glenn Korff School that has been wonderfully positive.”

It also helps current students whose family does not live nearby see them perform.

“The stories I love are the ones where students say my parents watched me do a performance, and they’ve never been able to see me play before,” O’Brien said. “We want you to see this concert. We want to showcase our students doing the thing that they are here to do and what they want to pursue for the rest of their lives, and that’s performing.”

Hixson-Lied Professor of Piano Mark Clinton was featured in the first webcast on Sept. 18, 2014.

“I was extremely gratified to learn that hundreds of people from several different countries listened to significant portions of my recital,” Clinton said. “It was a great honor for me to be part of the initial stages of this new outreach initiative from the Glenn Korff School of Music, and I believe this ongoing effort is a major component of ‘getting the word out’ about the quality of music making that consistently takes place in the Glenn Korff School. Once the performances are archived on YouTube, they become another important component of our recruiting strategy as well.”

O’Brien remembers how stressful that first webcast was.

“That entire night I was watching on the stream in the back of Kimball Hall,” O’Brien said. “I was watching on the screen, and the live performance was happening right in front of me. I had a pair of headphones in to make sure the audio was fine and the cameras are doing well and the lower thirds are coming up. It was something else. I did that for the first four events. Then I realized this thing can run itself a little bit.”

Professor and Director of Bands Carolyn Barber said she has heard many positive comments each time the Wind Ensemble has been webcast and notes two specific benefits.

“For us it has been a great way to enable composers to hear performances of their works. This included James Syler and Gernot Wolfgang for our last concert (in Texas and Austria, respectively),” she said. “I also know that several students with far-flung family members are really happy with the new resource. Last semester we had folks tuning in from Virginia and China to hear their kids perform—very cool.”

Professor and Director of Choral Activities Peter Eklund said his experience with webcasting this year has been nothing but positive.

“I’d like to think that it has not adversely affected our audience for live concerts,” he said. “We have received many, many positive remarks from around the country and the globe. It has increased our presence, and the attention our ensembles are receiving with the YouTube archiving is helpful.”

Brian Reetz, the promotion and publicity coordinator for the Glenn Korff School of Music, said webcasting helps fit Glenn Korff School of Music concerts into people’s busy lives.

“We make this available through webcasts, and people are able to find time to watch it,” he said. “The number for engagement is pretty good. The first semester went from curiosity to now it’s become more of ‘I’m going to watch.’”

The average time each individual person watched a concert during the Fall semester was 27 minutes. By Spring, the average had increased to 37 minutes. For concerts like the Wind Ensemble and Campus Band, the engagement number was closer to one hour. And for the Chiara String Quartet, they had an engagement of 96 minutes.

“It’s a two-hour concert,” O’Brien said. “That’s insane. I couldn’t be happier with the way this has pushed forward and the way it’s continuing.”

Next year, the Glenn Korff School of Music plans to webcast either the same number of concerts or perhaps even fewer.

“There are costs attached to each webcast,” Richmond said. “I think growing it modestly will only benefit us. We don’t want it to be a resource that’s taken for granted.”

O’Brien said they will focus on the key components of making the webcasts even more successful.

“Next year we’re not adding any more cameras or backend technology,” he said. “We’re focusing on our core tenets—Can we get better lighting? Can we make this more engaging from a visual standpoint? Can we make the audio more consistent?”

Richmond also hopes to solve the problem of dance not being part of the webcasts, since they do not typically perform in either Kimball Recital Hall or Westbrook Rm. 119 where the cameras are currently installed.

“We haven’t figured that out yet, but it’s on my list of things to do so we can get our wonderful dance students out before their families and before the academic modern dance community,” Richmond said. “There’s a great story to tell about our dance program, and we need to get it webcast, and we will.”

Reetz said they intend to build on the success of last year’s webcasting.

“It was a learning experience this year that without Dr. Richmond’s vision and Jeff O’Brien’s knowledge and capabilities would not have come to fruition,” he said. “Now we can see that we’ve reached nearly every country in the world. Suddenly, we’ve become global.”

To view which concerts will be webcast, visit https://arts.unl.edu/music/webcasts.

By the Numbers

Top Cities (where the most people watched from):
1.     Lincoln, Nebraska
2.     Omaha, Nebraska
3.     Jackson, Minnesota
4.     Sioux Falls, South Dakota
5.     Centennial, Colorado
6.     McAllen, Texas
7.     Guthrie Center, Iowa
8.     Kearney, Nebraska
9.     Porto Alegre, Brazil
10.   Aurora, Colorado

 

Countries reached include:
Australia
Brazil
Canada
China
Costa Rica
Germany
Israel
Japan
The Netherlands
New Zealand
Portugal
Serbia
South Africa
South Korea
Switzerland

The webcasts reached 47 of 50 states in the U.S. (except Maine, Delaware and Rhode Island)