Music festival asks public to compose 'Tweetfonie'

A German music festival Wednesday invited social media users to compose all-new orchestral pieces for a "Tweetfonie" to be given a world premiere later this year. The world of classical music is eagerly embracing Twitter and Facebook with musicians, conductors, concert halls and opera houses enthusiastic users of the platforms. The Kurt Weill Festival is taking this new-found enthusiasm one step further and planning a "Tweetfonie" of melodies composed by music-lovers and budding composers from all over the world and submitted via Twitter. The tunes, each limited to Twitter's requisite 140 characters, will be selected and then arranged for a symphony orchestra in the eastern city of Dessau which hosts the festival. The results will be given their world premiere by the Anhaltische Philharmonic Orchestra Dessau under its chief conductor Antony Hermus on March 3, as part of this year's festival. Budding Mozarts will be able to submit their melodies via a specially designed website www.tweetfonie.de, which goes live from February 28, with an online keyboard that converts tunes into tweet format, to then be sent on Twitter. "The most original tweets will then be arranged for orchestra by professionals sitting at their computers somewhere in the world," the festival organisers said in a statement. "The newly created works will be sent back to Dessau via internet, printed and then placed on the conductor's stand." The live performances of the orchestral versions of the tweets will be viewable online. This year's Kurt Weill Festival, dedicated to the German-Jewish composer who was born in Dessau in 1900 and died in exile in the United States in 1950, runs from February 22 until March 9. It will include more than 50 concerts, as well as films, exhibitions and lectures, at 17 different venues. Last year's festival attracted around 16,000 visitors to the composer's native city.