INTERVAL 5.2 Thruline Blog post 1

Part 1: The Origin of the Idea

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I know someone who used to work for a New York City-based orchestra.  A year or two ago, this orchestra was debating a new programming idea with the working title of "Subway Series."  My understanding of this title is that it comes from baseball, and is usually in reference to the annual New York Yankees / New York Mets series against each other.This got me thinking: if I worked for a music performance organization, what would I do with the idea of a subway series?Maybe it would be cool to divide up all the pieces on a program into their individual movements, and hear each of the movements of a piece at designated subway stops.  For example, you could be told ahead of time that on a certain day at a certain time, that you could hear all five movements of Philip Glass' fifth string quartet at each of the five Manhattan stops on the L-train.  The first movement at the 8th Avenue stop, the second movement at the 6th Avenue stop, the third at Union Square, etc, etc.Wait.  Wait!  I think I have a better idea: what if you could hear a single short piece at every subway stop?  We often see musicians playing music in the subways, we've even seen Joshua Bell performing Bach in a train station, but what if you heard the same piece at every single stop.  And what if that piece was something that literally everyone would recognize, even if they didn't know the name of the piece or the composer?What if…What if I could have a single cellist on every single subway platform performing the Prelude of the G-major solo cello suite by Bach?  With this, an idea was born… but the question remained: is it even possible to make something like this happen?Curatorial StatementTime: 7:00-8:00pmDate: Wednesday, December 21, 2011Place: Every Coney Island bound F-Train platform